This week, Cloudflare casually dropped the news that they blocked the biggest DDoS attack ever recorded. 37.4 terabytes of traffic all slammed into one IP in under a minute.

To visualise that, it’s like trying to stream over 9,000 HD movies at once, through one single connection. A completely overwhelming, targeted flood.

It was big, fast and came out of nowhere.

What kind of attack was it?

The attacker used a combination of reflection and amplification, mostly through outdated protocols like NTP, QOTD and RIPv1, plus some Mirai-style botnet traffic. In total:

• Over 122,000 source IPs
• Across 161 countries
• Targeting over 34,000 ports per second

All of that was pointed at a single hosting provider. Then… it was gone. Lasted just 45 seconds.

Cloudflare’s defences handled it automatically - no humans needed. Without that, it would’ve knocked the target out instantly.

Why should anyone care?

Because this isn’t a one-off, another record-breaking DDoS happened just a few weeks earlier.

The attacks are getting sharper and shorter. They’re testing how fast you can respond and how resilient your setup really is.

And what’s worrying is, a lot of companies still leave old-school protocols open. That’s how these attacks work, one vulnerable device becomes part of the network that takes someone else down.

If you’re not patching, reviewing, and filtering traffic properly, you could be helping fuel the next one.

Three quick takeaways:

• DDoS is no longer about slow drips; it’s sledgehammer speed. You need protections that activate instantly.
• Legacy protocols like QOTD and NTP shouldn’t still be exposed; if you don’t use them, shut them down.
• This hit a hosting provider, but the risk isn’t limited to cloud infrastructure. Any business that’s online is a potential target.

Final word

It’s about time to acknowledge how much the landscape has shifted.

Attacks like this aren’t rare, and they’re no longer slow or sloppy. They’re precise, powerful, and gone before you’ve even had time to react… unless your systems are already built to absorb the hit.

You don’t need a fortress, but you do need visibility, speed, and the ability to respond without scrambling. If your infrastructure isn’t designed with this kind of threat in mind, now’s the time to rethink it, before the traffic shows up on your doorstep.