

After investigating the issue, we found out that two apps with ad-blocking functionality were abusing our servers. Last November, our bandwidth usage shot up through the roof for no good reason. This whole situation rang a bell with us, because last year we had to grapple with the very same problem.
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The source of that dramatic surge, it turned out, were Android devices from India.

The overall traffic quickly snowballed from a couple of terabytes per day to 10-20 times that amount.

What happenedĪ couple of weeks ago EasyList maintainers saw a huge spike in traffic. However, if you try to download this file now, you'll see that it takes about 5 minutes to do so, even though the file size is not that big. If you're using an ad blocker, there's a 99.99% chance you are using EasyList or one of its derivatives.Īt its core, EasyList is basically just a text file available at the following address. There are many popular lists ( AdGuard filters is one of them), but EasyList has always stood out as the most prominent and the most popular one. EasyList is a community-run project that maintains one of the world’s most popular ad blocking filter lists. You may not be aware of it, but the work of every ad blocker is powered by “filter lists” - lists of rules that tell the ad blocker how exactly it should block ads. However, the origin of the issue is still unclear. 21st October Update: Thanks to Cloudflare, the problem with servers overload was resolved.
