Cloudflare blocks record-breaking DDoS attack, billions of packets at 11.5Tbps

A distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS attack, is designed to bring down a network, site, or online service by flooding it with fake requests to the point that it becomes overwhelmed and becomes inaccessible to all. It's a very serious issue that can lead to the loss of service for critical infrastructure, and over the years, the scale and complexity of DDoS attacks have continued to increase.

Cloudflare, a "connectivity cloud" solution designed to protect websites and networks, block bot traffic, and generally make the internet faster and more accessible, has announced that it recently blocked the largest recorded DDoS attack in history, which peaked at 11.5 terabits per second (Tbps) of traffic. Which is around 5.1Bpps, or 'billions of packets per second,'

"Cloudflare's defenses have been working overtime," Cloudflare wrote in a post on social media. "Over the past few weeks, we've autonomously blocked hundreds of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks, with the largest reaching peaks of 5.1 Bpps and 11.5 Tbps."

In a follow-up post, the company confirmed that the attack's source was a UDP flood from several IoT and cloud providers, including Google Cloud. The company plans to provide a detailed breakdown of the event in a report, so we'll have to wait a little while for more information on the intended target. A UDP flood is designed to bring down a server or system. UDP traffic, which includes IP addresses and ports, forces the target system to check each port in every packet, potentially overwhelming a server.

It appears that the frequency and intensity of these DDoS attacks are increasing, with BleepingComputer noting that this trend follows Cloudflare's announcement in June, in which it blocked a 7.8 terabits per second (Tbps) DDoS attack. Previously, the record was 3.8 TBps, set in October 2024. And now, with the number increasing to a massive 11.5 TBps, odds are we're going to hear about something even bigger soon.