Cloudflare’s records show how a DDoS attack can disrupt connectivity beyond a single website. On February 23, 2022, an attack congested a transit provider’s network and caused packet loss on a major connection to Cloudflare’s Kyiv data center. Cloudflare says its automated routing shifted traffic to other networks, helping preserve service.
The evidence is useful but limited: it describes traffic Cloudflare observed and mitigated on its own network and for its protected customers. It is not a complete count of attacks in Ukraine or a map of the global Internet backbone.
What happened to Cloudflare’s Kyiv connection
Cloudflare says a large DDoS attack on February 23, 2022, congested a transit provider’s network. The congestion produced packet loss on a major Internet connection to its Kyiv data center. In other words, the attack affected the path carrying traffic to a Cloudflare facility, not merely the application hosted on one Ukrainian website.
Cloudflare’s automated systems responded by routing traffic over other available networks. This is a practical reason large content-delivery and security networks use multiple transit paths: when one route is congested, traffic can sometimes be moved elsewhere. The incident does not establish which organization launched the attack or identify a specific victim. Cloudflare notes that shared IP addressing makes network-layer traffic reaching a data center difficult to assign to an individual customer or domain.
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How application and network DDoS attacks differ
Application-layer attacks
Application-layer attacks, commonly HTTP or HTTPS attacks, target the web application or service that users are trying to reach. They can exhaust application resources, overwhelm a web server with requests, or exploit expensive functions without saturating an entire physical link.
Network-layer attacks
Network-layer attacks target the transport path itself: routers, servers, or the Internet connection carrying packets. A sufficiently large attack can congest a transit provider’s network, producing packet loss for many flows that share the route. The Kyiv incident is the example Cloudflare uses for this kind of connectivity effect.
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How Cloudflare calculates activity
Cloudflare defines a DDoS activity rate as attack traffic divided by total observed traffic, including both attack and clean traffic, for the network, country, or category being analyzed. Its quarterly reports cover DDoS attacks that Cloudflare automatically detected and mitigated. That denominator and detection scope matter when interpreting every percentage below.
What Cloudflare reported during the first year of the invasion
| Date or period | Cloudflare-reported observation | How to interpret it |
|---|---|---|
| February 23, 2022 | A large DDoS attack congested a transit provider’s network and caused packet loss on a major connection to Cloudflare’s Kyiv data center; automated routing moved traffic to other networks. | A documented transit-connectivity incident, not a complete outage record for Ukraine. |
| March 8, 2022 | Mitigated application-layer threats to Ukraine peaked at 1,300% above Cloudflare’s pre-war baseline. | This is a relative increase in Cloudflare-observed mitigations, not a count of all attacks. “1,300% above” means the level was 14 times the baseline. |
| Q1 2022 | Network-layer DDoS activity represented 12.6% of traffic observed for Ukraine, compared with 1% in the previous quarter. | Cloudflare described this as a 1,160% quarter-over-quarter increase within its network measurement. |
| February 2022–February 2023 | Mitigations of potential attacks averaged 10% of all traffic to Ukraine in Cloudflare’s observation set. | The figure combines the company’s observed traffic and mitigation systems over this period; it is not a national Internet statistic. |
| October 29, 2022 | DDoS traffic reached 39% of traffic to Cloudflare-protected Ukrainian customer websites. | The scope is those protected websites, not every Ukrainian website or connection. |
The figures mix different measurement categories. The March 8 peak concerns application-layer threats blocked by Cloudflare’s web application firewall, while the Q1 percentage concerns network-layer activity in Cloudflare’s network. They should not be added together or treated as interchangeable attack counts.
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What Cloudflare says it did for Ukrainian organizations
In a March 7, 2022 post, Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince described several measures taken as attacks continued:
- Cloudflare extended its services at no cost to Ukrainian government and telecom organizations so they could continue operating and distributing information.
- The company said it was assisting more than 60 organizations in Ukraine and the surrounding region at that time.
- Ukrainian entities received expedited onboarding to Project Galileo, Cloudflare’s program for protecting organizations that provide public-interest services.
- Cloudflare moved customer encryption-key material out of data centers in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. It said services continued through Keyless SSL.
- Cloudflare said facilities and servers in those countries were configured to brick themselves if they lost power or Internet connectivity, with disk-encryption keys held off-site.
Those operational details are Cloudflare’s own statements about its response. The cited company post does not independently verify how each configuration performed during an incident.
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“Those attacks—and the steady stream of DDoS attacks we’ve seen in the days since—prompted us to extend our services to Ukrainian government and telecom organizations at no cost in order to ensure they can continue to operate and deliver critical information to their citizens as well as to the rest of the world about what is happening to them.”
What Cloudflare reported about targets in Ukraine and Russia
Cloudflare’s Q1 and Q2 2022 Radar reports describe different industry patterns in the two countries. These are attacks its systems detected and mitigated; source-country information is not proof of who sponsored or directed an attack.
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|---|---|---|
| Q1 2022 | HTTP attacks were concentrated in broadcasting, media and publishing, online media, media production, the Internet sector, and computer software. Cloudflare said the attacks came from multiple source countries. | Online media was the most targeted industry, followed by the Internet, cryptocurrency, and retail. Cloudflare listed Germany, the United States, Singapore, Finland, India, the Netherlands, and Ukraine among prominent source countries for HTTP attacks targeting Russian companies. |
| Q2 2022 | Broadcasting, online or Internet media, and publishing occupied all five of the most-attacked industry positions in Cloudflare’s account, a pattern the company interpreted as targeting information distribution. | Banking, financial services, and insurance represented almost 45% of application-layer DDoS attacks targeting Russia, according to Cloudflare; cryptocurrency was the second-most targeted industry. |
Why this is not a complete map of the Internet backbone
Cloudflare operates a global network of data centers and depends on transit-provider connections, so its incident reports reveal real behavior on important network paths. They do not show Cloudflare’s share of backbone infrastructure, nor do they make Cloudflare synonymous with the Internet backbone.
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Several limits apply to the reported numbers:
- They cover traffic visible to Cloudflare and attacks its systems detected and mitigated.
- Protected-customer traffic and traffic reaching a Cloudflare data center are different observation sets.
- Shared IP addresses can prevent precise assignment of a network-layer attack to a particular domain or customer.
- Percentages describe Cloudflare’s chosen denominator and period, not all Ukrainian or Russian Internet traffic.
- Observed source geography can show where traffic appeared to originate, but it does not by itself establish attacker identity, state responsibility, or intent.
A complete account of backbone routes, transit outages, or national connectivity would require measurements from independent operators and other vantage points.
Russia’s reported ISP throttling in 2026 is a separate issue
Cloudflare’s support advisory, updated April 23, 2026, says Internet service providers inside Russia were systematically throttling traffic to websites and services, including Cloudflare-protected services. The advisory says transfer could be limited to approximately 16 KB per connection, causing some sites to load poorly or fail, and that Cloudflare cannot reverse a restriction imposed at the ISP level.
That condition is different from a DDoS attack. A DDoS attack floods a service or network with malicious traffic; ISP throttling deliberately limits how much traffic a connection can carry. The 2026 statement is a dated Cloudflare advisory and may change, so its status should be checked near publication.
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