Google Cloud blocked a 46M requests-per-second DDoS attack on June 1, the largest ever and around 76% bigger than the attack Cloudflare thwarted in June
Jessica Lyons Hardcastle / The Register :
Context & Ripple Effects
Cloudflare had already reported a 15.3M-RPS HTTPS attack in April, followed by a 26M-RPS attack against a Free-plan customer in June. Google Cloud's newly disclosed mitigation resets that short-lived benchmark, underscoring how quickly application-layer attack scale was rising.
The later joint disclosure by Amazon, Google, and Cloudflare of a 398M-RPS attack tied to a newly identified flaw places this event in an escalation cycle in which providers' mitigation capacity and public incident reporting become competitive signals.
First-order effects
- Google Cloud protected the targeted customer from a 46M-RPS flood and established a higher public benchmark for HTTPS DDoS mitigation than Cloudflare's June disclosure.
- Cloudflare's 26M-RPS milestone was overtaken within the same month, raising the visible performance bar for its DDoS defense service.
Second-order effects
- Cloudflare, Amazon, and other large traffic-protection providers face stronger pressure to demonstrate that their networks can absorb request floods above the new benchmark, rather than rely on earlier record claims.
- Customers comparing cloud and edge-security providers gain a concrete capacity signal, making demonstrated mitigation performance more central to enterprise security procurement.
Third-order effects
- The sequence of record attacks, culminating in the later 398M-RPS incident, points to application-layer DDoS defense becoming an infrastructure-scale contest among the largest network operators.
- As attack surges exploit shared technical weaknesses, coordinated disclosures such as the Google, Amazon, and Cloudflare report may become as important as any single provider's mitigation claim.
The trend: Application-layer DDoS attacks are escalating in peak request volume, concentrating mitigation advantage with providers that operate global-scale cloud and edge networks.