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Cloudflare reported that it detected and mitigated an HTTP/2-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack exceeding 71 million requests per second (RPS) in February 2023. It was the largest HTTP DDoS attack Cloudflare had reported at the time—not a current record—and its RPS figure measures request volume, not network bandwidth.
What happened in the February 2023 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 RPS; the largest exceeded 71 million RPS. Cloudflare described the largest as more than 54% above the previous reported record of 46 million RPS from June 2022. These are Cloudflare’s observations of activity on its own network, not independently audited measurements of all internet traffic. Cloudflare’s later technical account is separate; the February incident figures were reported in its February 2023 account.
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The attack traffic used HTTP/2 and targeted websites protected by Cloudflare. The company said it originated from more than 30,000 IP addresses. That is an IP-address count, not a verified count of distinct devices or people. Cloudflare named targets in several categories: a popular gaming provider, cryptocurrency companies, hosting providers, and cloud computing platforms. It did not identify an attacker or establish a motive. Cloudflare’s incident report does not support attributing the activity to a specific group.
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RPS means requests per second: the number of HTTP requests sent in a given second. The reported 71 million figure describes request intensity at the HTTP application layer. It is not a bandwidth measurement, so it should not be restated as 71 terabits per second or compared directly with a network capacity figure. The February report does not provide a bandwidth equivalent for this attack.
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Was it related to the Super Bowl, Killnet, or the healthcare campaign?
Cloudflare did not name an attacker or establish a motive for the February attacks. It explicitly said it did not believe they were related to the then-recent healthcare campaign. The report also does not substantiate claims tying the incident to Killnet or the Super Bowl. Cloudflare’s account is the basis for those qualifications.
How does this compare with the later 201 million RPS attacks?
The February 2023 event and the later HTTP/2 Rapid Reset campaign are distinct incidents. In October 2023, Cloudflare, Google, and AWS disclosed a vulnerability campaign in which clients repeatedly sent HTTP/2 requests and canceled their streams, rapidly reusing stream capacity. Cloudflare’s technical account says that campaign began in late August 2023 and reached just over 201 million RPS. Its Q3 report described an average of 30 million RPS, 89 attacks above 100 million RPS, and a peak of 201 million RPS. These later figures refer to the Rapid Reset campaign; they do not revise the February attack’s reported size. Cloudflare’s Rapid Reset technical analysis and its Q3 2023 DDoS report describe that later activity.
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Rapid Reset exploited HTTP/2 request cancellation. As Cloudflare’s technical analysis put it, “HTTP/2 request cancellation can be abused to rapidly reset an unbounded number of streams.” If a server’s request processing or cleanup lags behind repeated requests and resets, the cycle can strain resources. Cloudflare described defenses including monitoring client-sent RST_STREAM frames and closing connections when they are abused, as well as improving frame processing, request dispatch, queuing, and scheduling. It recommended placing a DDoS mitigation service in front of web-facing servers and APIs while server vendors implemented fixes. The technical analysis explains the attack and mitigations.
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The event demonstrates that HTTP request floods can reach extraordinary volumes, but it does not mean every site is facing an attack or that every business needs the same defenses. The practical question is whether your site, API, or origin server could remain reachable when traffic spikes, and whether your mitigation layer can distinguish malicious volume from legitimate visitors. DDoS protection is an operational service and configuration decision, not a reason to buy a generic consumer networking gadget.
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What defenses did Cloudflare recommend?
For customers using its services, Cloudflare’s February 2023 report recommended the following measures. They are recommendations from that report, not a universal configuration recipe; assess them against your application, architecture, and tolerance for false positives.
- Keep DDoS Managed Rules at their default high-sensitivity and mitigation settings, unless your traffic needs call for adjustment.
- Eligible Enterprise customers could consider Adaptive DDoS Protection.
- Use firewall and rate-limiting rules together where they fit the application’s traffic patterns.
- Prevent direct public access to the origin server: configure it to accept traffic only from Cloudflare IP addresses. If an origin IP had already been targeted directly, Cloudflare advised considering a new origin IP.
Current Cloudflare documentation, last updated August 14, 2026, says its autonomous systems automatically detect and mitigate DDoS attacks and that protection is available across plans at network and application layers. Its setup documentation, last updated April 15, 2026, says managed DDoS rulesets are enabled by default for zones on Free, Pro, and Business plans; customers can tune rules if legitimate traffic is affected. These statements describe Cloudflare’s current service and documentation, not protection guarantees for every architecture or provider. See Cloudflare’s DDoS protection overview and its setup guide.
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