Security News > 2023 > February > Cloudflare blocks record-breaking 71 million RPS DDoS attack
This weekend, Cloudflare blocked what it describes as the largest volumetric distributed denial-of-service attack to date.
"The majority of attacks peaked in the ballpark of 50-70 million requests per second with the largest exceeding 71 million rps," Cloudflare's Omer Yoachimik, Julien Desgats, and Alex Forster said.
"This is the largest reported HTTP DDoS attack on record, more than 35% higher than the previous reported record of 46M rps in June 2022.".
Today's news comes after Google's announcement in August 2022 that it blocked a record DDoS attack over the HTTPS protocol against a Google Cloud Armor customer that had reached 46 million RPS. That was an increase of roughly 80% more than the previous record, an HTTPS DDoS of 26 million RPS mitigated by Cloudflare in June.
Volumetric DDoS attacks had slowly grown in size since 2021 when several botnets began leveraging powerful devices to hit targets with millions of requests per second.
In September 2021, the M?ris botnet hit Yandex with a 21.8 million RPS attack and previously hammered a Cloudflare customer with 17.2 million RPS. In reaction to this stream of ever-increasing attacks, the FBI seized dozens of Internet domains and charged six suspects for their involvement in running 'Booter' or 'Stresser' platforms that anyone can use to launch DDoS attacks.