On Tuesday 27 January 2026 at 03:12 UTC, a cache-busting query flood targeted a developer platform customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 49.7 million requests per second and lasted 59 minutes. Traffic originated from 1313 autonomous systems in 109 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | cache-busting query flood |
| Peak | 49.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 59 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.066 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.010% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.57% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a publicly announced sales event. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 200 within 5 seconds. The risk score of participating clients crossed the challenge threshold automatically and proof-of-work difficulty rose with origin load.
What the customer saw
Checkout conversion was unchanged compared with the same hour of the previous week.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.