On Thursday 14 May 2026 at 04:06 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a municipal services customer in the UK. The attack peaked at 29.7 million requests per second and lasted 28 minutes. Traffic originated from 4084 autonomous systems in 28 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 29.7 million requests per second |
| Duration | 28 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.151 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.037% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.79% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by an extortion email received two days earlier. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 96 within 36 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
A brief increase in p99 latency of 171 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
How do you avoid challenging uptime monitors and partners?
We moved from a scrubbing provider to always-on last year; time to mitigation went from minutes to basically nothing.
Our auditors asked for exactly this kind of incident evidence under DORA.