Tiger Woods: US Open Champ and DDoS launcher

Yesterday, a number of US-based ISPs thought they were under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack between noon and 1:30p EST as 'net traffic spiked 15% to 25% during that period. Another China-based attack?

Nope, it was Tiger Woods and his march toward a 14th major championship at the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines in California. An 18-hole playoff scheduled for Monday left many golf fans scrambling to watch while at work - either through Web site scoreboard updates, streaming media or other means (say, Slingbox). According to Arbor Networks Security to the Core blog, the interest in Tiger's quest created "one of the larger Internet-wide flash crowds in recent months."

It seems as if every year companies gird for traffic and productivity loss around the NCAA's March Madness event, which usually seems like more hype than reality. It's the unplanned events, like an 18-hole-plus-sudden-death overtime at the U.S. Open featuring the world's most popular player that can result in larger traffic sways when least expected and lost productivity at the office.

Thankfully, the DDoS attack was just Tiger capturing another title and the network seemed to hold up pretty well overall.