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What happened in the 2022 HTTPS DDoS attack?
The attack targeted a Cloud Armor customer on June 1, 2022. It began above 10,000 requests per second, climbed to 100,000 requests per second eight minutes later, and then surged from 100,000 to 46 million requests per second in just two minutes. It ended 69 minutes after it began. Google recorded 5,256 source IP addresses across 132 countries. Google Cloud’s incident report describes the event and mitigation.
The requests were encrypted HTTPS traffic, so Cloud Armor had to terminate TLS encryption to inspect and mitigate them. Google also noted that HTTP pipelining reduced the number of TLS handshakes required. About 22% of the source IP addresses were Tor exit nodes, but they generated about 3% of the attack traffic. Google associated the use of unsecured proxies with the Mēris family of attacks.
How did Cloud Armor stop 46 million requests per second?
The mitigation combined prior traffic learning, adaptive detection, customer validation, and filtering at Google’s edge. The customer had enabled Cloud Armor Adaptive Protection before the incident, allowing it to learn the application’s normal traffic patterns.
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- Establish a baseline: Adaptive Protection learned the customer’s typical traffic behavior before the attack.
- Detect the anomaly: As traffic spiked, Adaptive Protection identified the unusual pattern and sent an alert with a recommended protective rule.
- Validate in preview mode: The customer first tested the rule in preview mode to check that it would not block legitimate traffic.
- Enforce the rule: After validation, the customer deployed it. Google’s network edge blocked malicious requests upstream of the customer’s application.
This mattered because filtering occurred before the requests could burden the application itself. Google said the service stayed online and continued serving end users.
How does the 2022 attack compare with HTTP/2 Rapid Reset?
The 2022 event should not be confused with the later HTTP/2 Rapid Reset campaign. In August 2023, Google reported attacks exceeding 398 million requests per second that exploited HTTP/2 stream multiplexing. Google said the collective vulnerability was tracked as CVE-2023-44487 and rated High severity, with a CVSS score of 7.5.
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| Case | Peak and date | Protocol or method | Mitigation context |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud Armor customer attack | 46 million requests per second; June 1, 2022 | Encrypted HTTPS requests; Google associated proxy abuse patterns with Mēris | Adaptive Protection recommended a rule, the customer validated it, and Cloud Armor blocked requests at Google’s edge |
| Rapid Reset campaign | Above 398 million requests per second; reported by Google in August 2023 | HTTP/2 Rapid Reset using stream multiplexing; associated with CVE-2023-44487 | Google said global load balancing and DDoS infrastructure kept services running and attacks were largely stopped at its network edge |
The two incidents illustrate different attack techniques and should not be treated as a single event. Google recommends that operators patch internet-facing HTTP/2 servers, proxies, application servers, and load balancers according to their vendors’ guidance. For workloads behind Google global or regional Application Load Balancers, Google recommends always-on Cloud Armor protection, with rate limiting and Adaptive Protection as additional Layer 7 defenses. See Google’s explanation of HTTP/2 Rapid Reset and its report on the 398 million RPS campaign.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Is Project Shield the same as Cloud Armor?
No. Project Shield and Cloud Armor are distinct services with different intended audiences, although both use Google’s edge and proxy infrastructure to help protect websites.
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Cloud Armor is Google Cloud’s DDoS and application security service for Cloud customers. In the 2022 incident, it used Adaptive Protection to identify abnormal Layer 7 traffic and enforce a customer-approved rule at the provider edge.
Project Shield is a free reverse-proxy service for eligible news publishers, election organizations, and human-rights defenders. In a separate May 12, 2025 attack against KrebsOnSecurity, Google said traffic peaked above 6.3 terabits per second. Project Shield sat behind Google Cloud Load Balancing; Cloud Armor blocked volumetric traffic while the load balancer proxied HTTP and HTTPS requests. The units differ from the 2022 report: requests per second measures request volume, while terabits per second measures data rate, so the figures are not directly comparable. Details are in Google’s Project Shield account.
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