2.5K visits in under 2 hours (1.Viewing)

This morning I had over 2,500 visits for a single domain within less than 2 hours.

What's most strange is that I let the domain expire last year and it's currently available for registration... Moreover, I deleted the listing at Dan a long time ago too and it's not listed by anyone else... so how is it possible that my analytics shows all these visits to this domain I don't own or have listed anymore? Anybody know what's going or why this might be happening?

The domain in question is a French geo domain... which isn't that great and it never received much traffic at all when I did in fact own it.

robots/crawlers?

Have you checked Archive.org and Ahrefs backlinks checker https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker ?

Where's the traffic coming from?

I had high traffic from Boardman, Oregon (They were all bots)