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Several articles claim that 70% (or most) of the world's Internet traffic goes through Loudoun County, Virginia (or Ashburn, Virginia). Is this true?

Places where Wikipedia had this claim

Sources used to support the claim

  1. "Data Centers". Loudoun County Economic Development Authority. Retrieved 2020-07-03.{{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status ( link)
  2. O'Connell, Jonathan (March 5, 2014). "Why Ashburn, Va. is the center of the Internet". Washington Post. Retrieved 2020-08-03.{{ cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status ( link)
  3. Sharbel, Andrew (2013-01-16). "Another company joins data center rush". Loudoun Times-Mirror. Retrieved 2020-08-03.{{ cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status ( link)
  4. Blum, Andrew. "The Bullseye of America's Internet". Gizmodo. Retrieved 2020-08-03.
  5. "70 Percent of the World's Web Traffic Flows Through Loudoun County". Washingtonian. 2016-09-14. Retrieved 2020-08-03.
  6. "Windstream establishes 100G express route in red-hot Ashburn, Va. market via NJFX". FierceTelecom. Retrieved 2020-08-03.

Sources that cast doubt on the claim

  1. Stronge, Tim. "Does 70% of the World's Internet Traffic Flow Through Virginia?". blog.telegeography.com. Retrieved 2020-08-03.

Source notes

  • None of the sources used in support of the claim provide any further elaboration as to how they arrive at that statistic.
  • The Loudoun County Economic Development Authority (which I will abbreviate LCEDA) has a pretty clear conflict of interest here. This seems to be the master source from which all the other sources get their information; I have yet to find anything that's clearly independent.
  • The Washington Post link isn't original reporting. It's a little blurb atop an infographic from Intelishift Technologies (which, I should note, clearly promotes their Ashburn-based data centers). That infographic has sources, albeit in such tiny font that it's mostly illegible:
  • Because the infographic cites Wikipedia, and the claim showed up on Wikipedia before the publication of the article, it's possible that the information in the infographic came from the Dulles Technology Corridor article.
  • The Loudoun Times-Mirror article, the oldest source I can find that makes the 70% claim, quotes a LCEDA official right afterward, which suggests that they provided the information. The Times-Mirror is a pretty typical local news source.
  • The Gizmodo source (an excerpt from Blum's book) does not actually contain the 70% claim. It does reinforce that Ashburn is important to the Internet at large (a claim which seems indisputably true), but not that it carries some percentage of traffic.
    • Additionally, Blum's book (which has a dozen pages or so about Ashburn's role in internet infrastructure) also does not give a specific percentage.
  • The Washingtonian article gives the 70 percent claim, and, like the Loudoun Times-Mirror article, doesn't give a specific source but does attribute another claim about data centers in the article to the LCEDA.
  • The FierceTelecom article reads like a slightly rewritten press release, and says the claim is "according to industry estimates"

There are way more sources that repeat the 70% claim, but all of them that I've come across have the same basic problem: no associated details. I can't find a year where the claim was true, or even a vague reference to the original source of the statistic. It seems highly unlikely that all of these sources are computing the number themselves, and quite likely that the 70% number is just circulating around, being picked up by various news sites on the basis of other news sites reporting it.

My email exchange

I emailed Buddy Rizer at the Loudoun County Economic Development Authority, as he is quoted in several of the sources above. He responded saying that the statistic had been verified by the Department of Homeland Security "just a few years ago" in a resiliency assessment, and that he was not at liberty to share the background due to non-disclosure agreements. This seems generally plausible, though an unpublished source (especially a secret unpublished source) makes the information unreliable. The fact that generally reliable published sources have repeated the claim makes it plausible, though I don't think it's on solid enough grounding to restore to the articles from which it has been removed.

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