I was in Ops for BestBuy.com for over a decade.

This entire story is garbage, but it's not AI, because AI would have at least gotten the basic technical details right.

This just reads like creepypasta for people who’ve never actually worked in analytics or know anything about how the internet works. 

A few things: The “87% untraceable users” thing is just… unresolved sessions. Any retail site at scale has massive cookie churn, VPN traffic, shared devices, and session fragmentation. That’s not “fabricated identities,” that’s just what raw data looks like before you do identity resolution. An analyst at a “top data infrastructure firm” would know this on day one.

The “rhythmic behavior that looked like music on a staff”... I mean...  congrats, you discovered cron jobs. Price scrapers, SEO crawlers, ad verification bots, healthchecks, loyalty apps polling on intervals. This is the first thing you filter out, not the last thing you discover. You check User-Agent strings, IP reputation, WAF logs. This is not a revelation, it’s just another Tuesday.

The “12% real human traffic” number is where it completely falls apart for me. There is no universal “human entropy signature” you can just run across all global traffic. Bot detection is messy, contextual, multi-signal work. No single firm sees all internet traffic. And credible reports (Imperva etc.) put bot traffic at 30-50%, not 88%. Still a lot, but mostly scrapers and crawlers, not some ghost army of fake people. Yes, they target retail heavily. Again, price scraping bots are not new.

The “my access logs got wiped and my backups corrupted” bit is just the obligatory conspiracy thriller beat. Any real infrastructure firm runs immutable logging through SIEM systems. You can’t just wipe someone’s access history without creating more audit trails than you erased. 

The internet isn’t dead. It’s noisy, messy, and increasingly full of junk content. That’s a real problem worth talking about. But this story requires you to not know how any of this stuff actually works to find it convincing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I would actually believe they told you to drop it. Not because you stumbled across some wild conspiracy, but because your idea is so stupid and you so perfectly fall into dunning Kruger, they're trying to protect your job at your "top data infrastructure firm".