Weird high number of IE8 visitors for a brand new website?

Hi There,

We're seeing rather odd Visitor stats on our new sites, Just wondering if anyone can provide some insights.

Main observation/Issue:
* IE8 account for 94.7% of all visitors
* consistently 300-330 visitors per day since day 1 of removing the "under construction" page and search engine block.

Background/Facts:
* Brand new site - 2 week old
* Still alpha testing, bug fixing (especially for IE8)
* zero promo done at all.
* have setup FB/G+/Twitter profile and links to the site, but zero followers/friends (not promoted).
* site is very slow at the mo - not optimised (8-13sec load time depending on where you are)
* the niche (trending apparels) is targeted to people 18-35 of age, so (i'd imagine) there shouldn't be that high amount of IE8 users?

* almost 100% of all those IE8 visitors stays less than 10s on site with one action only.
* visitors are from all over the world (aroudn 40% from the US)
* 99% visitors are direct traffic (no promo).
* before removing the "under construction" page and search engine block, there was 1 visitor every 2 or 3 days.

* the domain that we bought was inactive at the time of purchase
* Our domain was ranked in the $490k in alexa - before under construction was lifted
* It is now ranked in the $430k in alexa - after under construction was lifted
* seems like it used to be an active site back in 2008 - according to web archives

Question:
* Why is there such a disproportional high number of IE8 visitors?
* Could they be bots? (doesn't seem obvious from the info and tag).
* If it's an flow through from the old user base, what might be the reason for the large IE8 presence?
* I have an apple phone can see the platform being registered correctly, are there platform/browsers that clickly classifies as IE8?

Just a bit puzzled by this observation.
Any comments/ideas would be appreciated : )

Thanks

Jason