  The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory
(SDO) returns high-resolution images of the solar atmosphere in seven extreme
ultraviolet (EUV) wavelength channels. The images are processed on the ground
to remove intensity spikes arising from energetic particles hitting the
instrument, and the despiked images are provided to the community. In this
article a three-hour series of images from the 171 A channel obtained on 28
February 2017 was studied to investigate how often the despiking algorithm gave
false positives caused by compact brightenings in the solar atmosphere. The
latter were identified through spikes appearing in the same detector pixel for
three consecutive frames. 1096 examples were found from the 900 image frames.
These "three-spikes" were assigned to 126 dynamic solar features, and it is
estimated that the three-spike method identifies 20% of the total number of
features affected by despiking. For any ten-minute sequence of AIA 171 A images
there are therefore around 35 solar features that have their intensity modified
by despiking. The features are found in active regions, quiet Sun, and coronal
holes and, in relation to solar surface area, there is a greater proportion
within coronal holes. In 96% of the cases, the despiked structure is a compact
brightening of size two arcsec or less and the remaining 4% have narrow,
elongated structures. By applying an EUV burst detection algorithm, we found
that 96% of the events could be classed as EUV bursts. None of the spike events
are} rendered invisible by the AIA processing pipeline, but the total intensity
over an event's lifetime can be reduced by up to 67%. Users are recommended to
always restore the original intensities to AIA data when studying short-lived
or rapidly evolving features that exhibit fine-scale structure.
