Vipul Naik, 08/01/2017 08:13:
It looks like a bot that happened to run in France but didn't get classified by the existing algorithms as a bot.
Seems most likely indeed, especially since France appears as first country for nearly all wikis from Esperanto and below (<= 0.01% share of global total) at https://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2016-10/SquidReportPageVie... , closely followed by USA.
France is also 97 % of traffic for bm.wiki, which has a -87% that month, while we have no breakdown for kg, rn, tpi, ee, lg, cr; bg (+124 %) and wuu (+81 %) seem different patterns. (For convenience, I attach the TablesPageViewsMonthlyOriginal.htm row for the month sorted by variation.)
Does anybody have any other ideas about what might have happened here?
It can happen that some large IP ranges are reassigned to a different ISP, or otherwise get used in different countries, so that a significant portion of traffic seems to "move" to other countries: for instance we had this problem with Australia once (http://infodisiac.com/blog/2010/01/wikipedia-page-views-a-global-perspective... ). I'm not sure any ISP could have real users for so many languages: perhaps a huge mobile operator (Orange?) or some hosting suddenly used for a lot of proxying (OVH?), but I wouldn't bet on it.
Nemo