Nowhere on the page does it say "exploding", OP is exaggerating what is roughly linear growth. I think the title should be edited.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying this is not worth posting or should be taken down, just "exploding" does not even remotely describe DDG's traffic. The post was interesting, only OP's fabricated title is inaccurate.
Edit 2: Several comments mention the graph does show daily searches, and is therefore showing exponential growth. My reason for thinking it's cumulative and not daily, is because it says below that the daily record is 29 million searches and that the cumulative number is 22.569 billion. When hovering over the last value in the graph, it shows 22.2 billion.
For the record, the current title is "DuckDuckGo Usage is exploding right now".
The submitted title "DuckDuckGo Usage is exploding right now" is editorializing and is against the HN site guidelines. It should be changed to the actual page title, "DuckDuckGo Traffic".
If you change the "365 Day Average" above the graph to, say "7 day average" you'll see a recent uptick that does justify the "exploding right now" language.
It went from 23.5 million/day to 27.9 in the last 51 days, which is 134% annualized growth. Something happened around 7 August.
Google's privacy policy change in 2012 is perhaps the closest comparable past event - over two months DDG traffic trebled. Recent stories about Google might be driving this.
When hovering over the last value in the graph, I see 22 million. I don't know where you found the next three digits It looks like the plot is lagging the numbers below, for some reason.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying this is not worth posting or should be taken down, just "exploding" does not even remotely describe DDG's traffic. The post was interesting, only OP's fabricated title is inaccurate.
Edit 2: Several comments mention the graph does show daily searches, and is therefore showing exponential growth. My reason for thinking it's cumulative and not daily, is because it says below that the daily record is 29 million searches and that the cumulative number is 22.569 billion. When hovering over the last value in the graph, it shows 22.2 billion.
For the record, the current title is "DuckDuckGo Usage is exploding right now".