Cloudflare has once again successfully defended against a record-breaking DDoS attack. The security company reports that the attack had a peak load of 22.2 terabits per second (Tbps) and 10.6 billion packets per second (Bpps).
According to BleepingComputer, this makes it the largest attack publicly disclosed to date. The attack lasted only 40 seconds, but the volume of traffic was enormous. According to Cloudflare, it was equivalent to simultaneously streaming a million 4K videos or 1.3 web page refreshes per second by every citizen of the world.
DDoS attacks aim to make servers, networks, and applications inaccessible by flooding them with traffic. This can lead to delays or complete service outages. In recent months, a clear trend has emerged toward an increase in the scale and frequency of these types of attacks. Less than three weeks ago, Cloudflare successfully mitigated an attack with a rate of 11.5 Tbps and 5.1 Bpps. Two months earlier, a peak of 7.3 Tbps was recorded. The current attack thus follows a pattern of increasingly large and complex incidents.
Fully automated response
A striking aspect of the recent attack is that Cloudflare was able to mitigate it completely automatically. The system detected the attack and responded without the need for human intervention. This underlines the importance of automated protection against hyper-volumetric attacks, which are often short but very intense. The short duration fits in with the tactic known as “hit-and-run.” This involves attempting to cause as much damage as possible in the limited time that the attack lasts, before defenders can respond manually.
Although Cloudflare has not shared details about the origin of the attack, a previous record attack was attributed to the AISURU botnet. That network of infected devices is believed to have affected more than 300,000 systems worldwide and exploited vulnerabilities in routers, IP cameras, and other IoT devices. No specific actor or botnet has yet been identified for the 22.2 Tbps attack.
Cloudflare has been warning for some time about an increase in large-scale DDoS attacks. In the second quarter of 2025, the company recorded a 44 percent increase compared to a year earlier. In that quarter alone, more than 6,500 hyper-volumetric attacks were detected. According to Cloudflare, the 22.2 Tbps incident illustrates that companies and organizations must be prepared for attacks that are unprecedented in scale and for which traditional security measures prove insufficient.