Cloudflare reported that the largest HTTP DDoS attack it saw over the weekend before February 13, 2023, exceeded 71 million requests per second (RPS). That was the largest HTTP DDoS attack reported at the time, according to Cloudflare—not a current record. The figure describes request volume, not bandwidth, and the company’s account does not identify who launched the attacks.
What happened in Cloudflare’s 71 million RPS attack?
On February 13, 2023, Cloudflare said it had detected and mitigated dozens of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks over the preceding weekend. Most peaked at roughly 50–70 million requests per second; the largest exceeded 71 million RPS. Cloudflare said the peak was more than 54% above the previous reported record of 46 million RPS from June 2022. These are Cloudflare’s measurements of activity on its own network, as reported at the time, rather than independently audited global measurements. Cloudflare’s February 13, 2023 report has the incident details.
RPS counts HTTP requests arriving each second. It is not a measure of network bandwidth, so 71 million RPS should not be restated as a terabit-per-second attack. The distinction matters: request intensity describes how many application-level operations a service must handle, while bandwidth describes the volume of data moving over the network.
Who and what did the attacks target?
Cloudflare said the attacks were based on HTTP/2 and targeted websites protected by its service. The company named popular gaming providers, cryptocurrency companies, hosting providers, and cloud computing platforms among the target categories. It reported that the attacks originated from more than 30,000 IP addresses. That is an IP-address count, not a verified count of individual devices or people. The report did not name an attacker or establish a motive. Cloudflare’s incident account states that “The attacks were HTTP/2-based and targeted websites protected by Cloudflare” and that “The attacks originated from over 30,000 IP addresses.”
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Was the attack linked to the Super Bowl or Killnet?
Cloudflare did not attribute the activity to Killnet or the Super Bowl. It also said it did not believe the attacks were related to the then-recent healthcare campaign. The available account therefore supports describing an unattributed set of HTTP/2 DDoS attacks—not assigning them to a group or event.
How is this different from the later 201 million RPS attacks?
The February 2023 71-million-RPS incident and the later HTTP/2 Rapid Reset campaign are separate events. In October 2023, Cloudflare, Google, and AWS disclosed Rapid Reset, a vulnerability campaign involving repeated HTTP/2 requests followed by cancellation of their streams. Rapidly reusing stream capacity can make servers spend resources processing requests or cleaning up cancellations faster than they can keep up. Cloudflare’s technical analysis describes the issue as: “HTTP/2 request cancellation can be abused to rapidly reset an unbounded number of streams.” Cloudflare’s October 10, 2023 technical analysis explains the mechanism and defenses.
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Cloudflare said the later campaign began in late August and reached just over 201 million RPS. Its third-quarter 2023 report described an average of 30 million RPS, 89 attacks above 100 million RPS, and a peak of 201 million RPS. Those figures describe the later Rapid Reset campaign; they do not revise the February 2023 report. Cloudflare’s Q3 2023 DDoS report gives those campaign statistics.
Should website owners worry about attacks like this?
The report shows that high-volume HTTP attacks can threaten websites and APIs, but it does not mean every site is facing an attack of this scale. For an organization operating a public service, the practical concern is whether its application, network, and hosting setup can absorb malicious request traffic while continuing to serve legitimate visitors. Defenses need to be designed around the service’s architecture and normal traffic patterns; rules that are too aggressive can block genuine users.
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What defenses did Cloudflare recommend?
In its February 2023 incident report, Cloudflare recommended keeping DDoS Managed Rules at default high sensitivity and mitigation settings, combining firewall and rate-limiting rules, and ensuring the origin server was not publicly exposed and accepted traffic only from Cloudflare IP addresses. It also advised considering new origin IP addresses if an origin had previously been targeted directly. These were Cloudflare’s recommendations for its service and the architectures it discussed, not universal settings for every deployment. The original report also suggested considering Adaptive DDoS Protection for eligible Enterprise customers.
Put protection in front of the origin
A mitigation service can inspect and absorb hostile traffic before it reaches the web server or API. Cloudflare’s later Rapid Reset analysis recommended placing a DDoS mitigation service in front of web-facing servers and APIs while server vendors implemented fixes. Regardless of provider, check that direct access to the origin is restricted; otherwise an attacker may be able to bypass the filtering layer and target the server itself.
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Tune rules for real traffic
Firewall, rate-limit, and managed DDoS rules can help limit abusive traffic, but thresholds should reflect the application’s legitimate usage. A sudden burst may be normal for some services, and a rule that treats every high request rate as malicious can cause false positives. Cloudflare’s current documentation says its autonomous systems automatically detect and mitigate DDoS attacks, with protection across plans at network and application layers. Its setup guidance says managed DDoS rulesets are enabled by default for zones on Free, Pro, and Business plans, and rules can be tuned if legitimate traffic is affected. See Cloudflare’s DDoS protection documentation and its setup guidance for current service details.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How did Cloudflare respond to Rapid Reset?
For the later Rapid Reset campaign, Cloudflare described defenses that included monitoring client-sent RST_STREAM frames and closing connections when those frames were abused. It also reported improvements to frame processing, request dispatch, queuing, and scheduling. Those engineering measures address the request-cancellation technique in that later campaign; they should not be confused with a claim that the February 2023 incident used Rapid Reset.
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