This is a fun little mystery that I recently read about. Wikimedia Commons, the image database associated with Wikipedia, is home to almost 70 million free-to-use media files, one of which is this innocuous photo of a purple flower. More precisely, it depicts a New York aster (Symphyotrichum novi-belgii) and was taken by user TeunSpaans in The Hague, Netherlands, in October 2004.

On February 8, 2021, Chris Albon, director of machine learning at the Wikimedia Foundation, tweeted [Twitter link removed] that this image alone accounted for 20% of media requests on their servers and that nobody knew why.

In the Wikimedia ticket discussion that followed, soon some clues were collected: The traffic seemed to come from a mobile app. And, supposedly because of its generic and aesthetically pleasing nature, the image was often used in example code on programming sites such as StackOverflow. It seemed likely that somebody had just copypasted some of this example code and forgot to remove the reference to the purple flower photo.

Additionally, it was found that the increase in traffic dated to June 29, 2020, the day that the Indian government banned a number of Chinese apps, including TikTok – which allowed local Indian alternatives to suddently amass millions of new users. Spikes in traffic also closely corresponded to Indian holidays, e.g. Gandhi Jayanti on October 2 or New Year's Eve. Possible culprits were suggested to be Mitron TV, an Indian TikTok alternative, and Say Namaste, an Indian Zoom alternative (which was launched on June 9).

Ultimately, Sukhbir Singh, a Wikimedia Foundation engineer, was able to identify the app in question after extensive investigation – if you're interested in the technical details, he describes the process in detail in the Wikimedia thread linked above. The requests for the purple flower photo were blocked and Singh got in contact with the developers, who subsequently removed the code that constantly requested the image. After the app was updated, it seems that the hits on the image have gone back to normal. But as it was never directly named, the mystery still persists of which app was at fault for this unusual phenomenon.

Sources:

https://restofworld.org/2021/the-mysterious-photo-of-a-purple-flower-that-receives-78-million-hits-each-day/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjpmyx/why-is-this-flower-on-wikipedia-suddenly-getting-90-million-hits-per-day