Firebase database bandwidth usage growing rapidly even when when the database is not in use

Question

Update: After 9 months of back-and-forth emails (over 40 emails), Google has acknowledged that they have found some bugs that may be responsible for high ba

Answer 1

The usage chart takes time to update. You may be seeing bandwidth from a few minutes to a few hours ago.

Also, this reminds me of the old Google Analytics referrer issue, the default rules for firebase look something like this:

.read = true;
.write if auth != null; 

This means that anyone anywhere can read from your database and that anyone authenticated(even anonymously) can write to it. It is possible since it is a noSQL database with json support that it is probably just crawlers which are the equivalent of Google Analytics referral spam.