Cloudflare faced an unprecedented distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) onslaught that peaked at 22.2 terabits per second (Tbps). According to reports, the attack lasted only about 40 seconds but briefly became the largest ever seen. Such hyper-volumetric floods – measured in both raw bandwidth and packet rate – threaten to overwhelm even large networks. In this post we break down what happened, why it’s significant, and how businesses can ensure continuity and resilience in the face of growing DDoS threats.
Record-Breaking DDoS Attack Details
The recent Cloudflare incident was truly staggering:
- Peak volume: 22.2 Tbps of traffic.
- Packet rate: 10.6 billion packets/sec.
- Duration: ~40 seconds of sustained flood.
- Data equivalent: roughly 1,000,000 simultaneous 4K video streams.
By comparison, just weeks earlier Cloudflare had mitigated an 11.5 Tbps attack, and the infamous 2016 Mirai botnet peak against DNS provider Dyn was only ~1.2 Tbps. In other words, today’s attack smashed previous records. Security analysts noted it behaved like a “UDP carpet bomb,” spreading traffic from over 400,000 source IPs into tens of thousands of destination ports every second. This makes blocking it extremely hard: as one report observes, firewalls or load balancers simply “can’t process” such a torrent of packets.
Infrastructure Resilience and Mitigation
Fortunately, Cloudflare’s massive global network absorbed the onslaught. The company’s systems automatically detected and scrubbing-filtered the traffic, ensuring the targeted services stayed up. Cloudflare itself noted this peak of 22.2 Tbps was “twice as large as anything seen on the Internet before” and questioned whether any mitigation provider could handle that scale. In practical terms, this means Cloudflare’s many distributed data centers (>100 Tbps capacity network) acted as a safety net. Without such cloud-based DDoS protection, smaller networks or traditional on-premise gear would likely have collapsed. In fact, the BleepingComputer analysis emphasizes that even if bandwidth capacity is high, routers and firewalls will choke on 10.6 billion packets/sec. This attack underscores that only highly distributed, internet-scale defenses can keep critical infrastructure online under hyper-volumetric assault.
Protecting Business Continuity
For businesses, downtime is painful and expensive. Real-world data shows that every minute offline costs companies thousands of dollars. One industry report found even a single hour of IT downtime costs a mid-sized business about $300,000 on average, and for large enterprises it can easily run into the millions. A DDoS outage disrupts sales, halts productivity, and can damage reputation. The latest Cloudflare event is a reminder that firms must bake DDoS mitigation into their continuity plans. Strategies include using CDN or cloud mitigation providers, distributing services across multiple data centers, and having rapid incident response playbooks. By investing in resilient, layered defenses, organizations can ensure that even record-setting attacks do not cripple their operations.
