Streaming video traffic coverage of Obama's inauguration flooded North American backbones today. Traffic increases varied wildly across US providers with some seeing an overall 5% increase in backbone traffic and others jumping more than 40%.

Source: The Great Obama Traffic Flood

As a worker in information technology, I am lucky to be close enough to the wire to every now and then peek at the real world to see what is going on.

With today being a fairly special day, I decided to stroll over to our networking group to peek at the traffic monitors, and I was greeted by nice solid green lines. This was the first time in my professional career that I was at the right place at the right time: our external bandwidth was pegged at 100% use, and would not move.




Now, when you scale this up a bit and start looking at Big Pipes, you get images like the following:

Traffic peaking at 3.5 Tb/s is just simply unbelievable. 3.5 Tb/s is really a lot of data, flowing really fast.

I
guess all we can say is: President Obama managed to pull off the
largest distributed-denial-of-service attack in the world's history. A key quote from the acceptance speech of the 44th President of the
United States:

"We will restore science to its
rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise
health care's quality and lower its cost. We will
harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars
and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and
colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.
All this we can do. And all this we will do."

Puts the whole Heartland-debacle in its own perspective.