Cloudflare mitigates biggest ever DDoS attack, which tried to pelt its target with 11.5 Tbps of data in less than a minute

Cloudflare headquarters in San Francisco

(Image credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Is it a day ending in 'y'? Well then that makes it just about time for Cloudflare to announce it's mitigated yet another record-breaking DDoS attack—this time to the tune of 11.5 Tbps (that's terabits per second) at its peak. Might as well add 'hyper-volumetric DDoS attack' to my list of sleep paralysis nightmares.

Anyway, Cloudflare shared on X that the attack in question was specifically a UDP flood-style attack. Cloudflare have their own helpful explainer of what this style of attack entails, but another way to describe it would be to deploy another of my tried and true club metaphors.

Cloudflare says that a more in-depth breakdown of this doozy of a DDoS attack will feature in its next report—and I, for one, cannot wait to get into all of the metaphorical club gossip. Especially as this recent attack makes the previous record breaker—an attack Nick helpfully described as comparable to "over 260 copies of Baldur's Gate 3 in less than a minute"—seem like a downright forgettable drop of tea.

Considering figures from last year suggested that bots account for half of global web traffic, charging AI companies for the privilege of slurping up 'training data' is hardly an unpopular idea. However, not everyone wanted to play by Cloudflare's rules, resulting in a post calling out AI search engine company Perplexity for "using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives." Perplexity clapped back by calling the company "more flair than cloud." Might want to go back to the drawing board on that one…

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Jess has been writing about games for over ten years, spending the last seven working on print publications PLAY and Official PlayStation Magazine. When she’s not writing about all things hardware here, she’s getting cosy with a horror classic, ranting about a cult hit to a captive audience, or tinkering with some tabletop nonsense.

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