Web mystery sees random flower picture receive 90 million hits every day

'20 per cent of all requests to one of our data centres are for this image of a flower,' says Wikimedia director. 'Nobody knows why'

Wikimedia noticed ‘unusual media traffic patterns’ for this picture of a flower on 8 February, 2021 (Wikimedia Commons)

A picture of a purple daisy is receiving up to 100 million hits every day, prompting an investigation into the "ongoing mystery" by the website hosting it

The royalty-free photo is one of millions of images available on Wikimedia Commons, but is accounting for around 20 per cent of all traffic generated by the online database.

It is a relatively innocuous image of an aster variety of flower taken in Florence Nightingalepark in The Hague in 2004, but on 29 June last year it saw a sudden and sustained surge in online hits. Over the last month it has averaged 90 million hits per day.

The mysterious – and resource draining – activity led to an investigation being launched by the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation that oversees Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

"Check out this actual, live ticket about an ongoing mystery," Chris Albon, director of machine learning at Wikimedia Commons, wrote on Twitter on Monday.

"20 per cent of all requests to one of our data centres for media are for this image of a flower. Nobody knows why."

The public investigation into the "unusual media traffic pattern" was posted on the organisation's collaborative Phabricator platform typically used for managing software projects.

"We've noticed today that we get about 90m requests per day from various ISPs in India, all with the same characteristics," a post investigating unusual traffic patterns stated.

"These are very strange, as they come from wildly different IPs [and] follow a daily traffic pattern."

Web sleuths attempted a variety of techniques, such as reverse image searches, in order to track down where the traffic was coming from, but no results proved fruitful.

Code within the data requests suggested that it was coming from a mobile app, with the majority of web addresses coming from India. Internet users in India involved in the investigation appeared perplexed, as the image of the flower was not familiar to them despite its popularity.

The investigators tried downloading popular apps in an attempt to "identify the image in their splash screens or within the apps", but no image of a daisy could be found.

Eventually, it was concluded that the app was "fetching the image from Wikimedia Commons but not displaying it".

A post by Sukhbir Singh, a software engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation, stated: "We found the specific app that was making the request by matching the time when it was opened and the time the image was requested from our servers."

The identity of the app is yet to be publicly disclosed while the issue remains ongoing, though Wikimedia said it was a "popular chat/social media app used in India", leading to speculation that it might be a local TikTok rival.

The Chinese giant was restricted in India at around the same time that the surge in data requests for the flower image first began, which had caused people to seek out alternatives.

A report in Rest of World speculated that the culprit may be an Indian TikTok competitor like MX TakaTak, Moj or Josh. The Wikimedia Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.