Microsoft says it mitigated a 2.4Tbps DDoS attack on an Azure customer at the end of August, breaking AWS' record of mitigating a 2.3Tbps attack in Feb. 2020
Context & Ripple Effects
The largest-DDoS crown has been changing hands as a public benchmark between hyperscalers. Amazon set the mark when AWS Shield absorbed a 2.3 Tbps flood in February 2020, itself an upgrade on a 1.7 Tbps attack from March 2018.
Microsoft now takes the record with a late-August mitigation on an unnamed Azure customer, and the trajectory it kicked off kept steepening: Microsoft topped its own number at 3.47 Tbps just months later, and by October 2025 it reported a 15.7 Tbps blast from the Aisuru botnet as the largest cloud DDoS ever recorded. Each disclosure doubles as a sales pitch for the vendor's DDoS protection tier.
First-order effects
- The targeted Azure customer stayed online under a 2.4 Tbps flood, and Microsoft gains the 'largest-ever mitigation' claim that AWS had held since early 2020.
Second-order effects
- AWS is cast as the dethroned incumbent and faces pressure to publish a bigger Shield mitigation to reclaim the benchmark, while Cloudflare — which later reported absorbing a 7.3 Tbps attack — competes in the same record-as-marketing contest.
Third-order effects
- Attack volumes are scaling far faster than the 2018-to-2020 record cadence suggested, pointing toward botnet-driven floods large enough that only the biggest cloud scrubbing networks can absorb them — making record disclosures a recurring competitive ritual among Microsoft, AWS, and Cloudflare rather than one-off news.
The trend: Cloud providers are turning ever-larger DDoS mitigations into a public capability benchmark, with record sizes escalating from terabits toward tens of terabits as botnet capacity grows.