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Cloudflare says it has (once again) blocked the largest-ever DDoS attack in history

By Wayne Williams

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Cloudflare says it has (once again) blocked the largest-ever DDoS attack in history

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Cloudflare says it has (once again) blocked the largest-ever DDoS attack in history

Wayne Williams

24 September 2025

The 40-second, 22.2Tbps, attack was fast and furious

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(Image credit: FrameStockFootages / Shutterstock)

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.

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Hacking group NoName057(16) remains the most prolific DDoS player as automation, AI, and rogue LLMs make Tbps attacks a common occurrence

The DDoS smoke screen: why restoring uptime may be your first mistake

Mr Hamza, Mysterious Team Bangladesh, and Keynous+ led a massive surge in DDoS on US businesses following an attack on Iran

(Image credit: Cloudflare)
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.

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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

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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.

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Hacking group NoName057(16) remains the most prolific DDoS player as automation, AI, and rogue LLMs make Tbps attacks a common occurrence

The DDoS smoke screen: why restoring uptime may be your first mistake

Mr Hamza, Mysterious Team Bangladesh, and Keynous+ led a massive surge in DDoS on US businesses following an attack on Iran

Europol says it disrupted a major pro-Russian DDoS crime gang

Hacker behind “Rapper Bot” DDoS-for-hire Botnet which carried out over 370,000 attacks arrested

Internet speeds 3.5 million times faster than US average are possible with current fiber optic cable tech – so how does 1,020,000 Gbps sound?

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