On Friday 22 May 2026 at 03:31 UTC, a HTTP POST flood targeted a video streaming customer in Iberia. The attack peaked at 287.8 million requests per second and lasted 133 minutes. Traffic originated from 1809 autonomous systems in 64 countries, predominantly a headless-browser farm.
| Vector | HTTP POST flood |
| Peak | 287.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 133 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.042 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.041% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.14% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a competitor’s product launch. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 574 within 39 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
The customer’s status page stayed green throughout; they learned about the attack from our notification.
Recommendations
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.
The point about origin IPs leaking through certificate transparency logs is underrated.
Thanks — sharing this with our on-call team.
Great to hear, thanks for sharing your experience.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?