• Cloudflare reports halting record DDoS attack peaking at 22.2Tbps and 10.6Bpps
• The attack lasted only 40 seconds, yet equaled streaming one million 4K videos
• Image shows automated detection of world record DDoS holding peak strength before collapse

Cloudflare has said it recently successfully stopped the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ever recorded.

The attack reached 22.2 terabits per second and 10.6 billion packets per second, setting a new world record.

DDoS attacks overwhelm system or network resources with traffic, slowing down or cutting access for legitimate users – and although this particular attack was short lived, lasting only about 40 seconds, the volume involved was massive.

No need for manual intervention

Bleeping Computer compared it to streaming one million 4K videos at the same time, with a packet rate equivalent to every person on Earth refreshing a web page once a second.

An image shared by Cloudflare (above) on X showed the attack ramping up to peak strength in seconds, then holding steady at more than 22Tbps before dropping off sharply.

The firm says its systems detected and mitigated the incident autonomously without manual intervention.

Just three weeks earlier, Cloudflare said it mitigated a 11.5Tbps and 5.1Bpps attack, which was the largest reported at the time.

More recently, FastNetMon announced it had detected and mitigated a 1.5 billion packets per second DDoS attack with the traffic mainly a UDP flood sourced from compromised customer-premises equipment including IoT devices and MikroTik routers.

This latest 22.2Tbps figure sets a new bar for DDoS assaults, showing how quickly attack sizes have escalated over the past few months.

Cloudflare did not reveal any key details about the latest event, including the source or the target, but it did confirm the record-breaking attack was stopped before any lasting damage could occur.

Mitigation of an attack of this scale is tricky, since firewalls, routers, and load balancers struggle to handle such high request counts.

Even if the total bandwidth is under control, packet flooding alone can disrupt services.

Back in April, Cloudflare noted that 2025 was on track for record levels of DDoS activity.

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Wayne Williams is a freelancer writing news for TechRadar Pro. He has been writing about computers, technology, and the web for 30 years. In that time he wrote for most of the UK’s PC magazines, and launched, edited and published a number of them too.