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Solar eclipse drives dip in UK internet traffic @lonap

internet traffic dip during eclipseInternet traffic dip during eclipse – unusual behaviour for a big news event

We saw an unusual internet traffic dip in traffic across the LONAP network this morning as presumably people downed their devices and went outside to watch the solar eclipse.

I only found out the eclipse was happening yesterday as the papers started to publish guides on how to watch it without looking directly into the sun.

The chart thumbnail on the left shows the traffic building normally for the day. Then as the scheduled time for the event draws nearer you can see the upward curve stops abruptly and then drops down again.

These solar eclipses are, we are told very rare events. The internet traffic pattern that resulted is also rare:)

I was having a late breakfast in London at the time of the eclipse. Between mouthfulls I kept popping outside to see if there was any sign of it. Not a single ray! In fact the sun was nowhere to be seen in London. V disappointing.

LONAP is a London based Internet Exchange Point and I have to say that I am privileged to be on their board. You can check out other peering posts here. As far as I can recall there are no other eclipse related posts:)

internet traffic dip during eclipse – exciting though the eclipse was a disappointment.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

3 replies on “Solar eclipse drives dip in UK internet traffic @lonap”

We actually saw an increase of over 1.5Gbps between about 9:20 and 10:00 this morning (the eclipse occurring at around 9:30).

And actually looking at both LINX and LONAP total graphs,these do show a marked increase in traffic at these times.

But I suspect you have access to more granular graphs for LONAP traffic and the increase seen was most likely people then going online to watch it 🙂

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