“We’ve noticed today that we get about 90M requests per day from various ISPs in India, all with the same characteristics:”
One photo of a purple flower made up about 20% of Wikimedia’s media requests at its Singapore data centre. The likely culprit was a mobile app hotlinking it, maybe for a splash screen. A donor-funded charity paid for the bandwidth. The app’s makers answered email with an autoresponder asking for a phone number.