On Friday 31 July 2026 at 12:20 UTC, a HTTP/2 rapid reset targeted a video streaming customer in Western Europe. The attack peaked at 812.9 million requests per second and lasted 140 minutes. Traffic originated from 734 autonomous systems in 22 countries, predominantly misconfigured open reflectors.
| Vector | HTTP/2 rapid reset |
| Peak | 812.9 million requests per second |
| Duration | 140 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.194 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.032% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.61% |
Timeline
The attack was preceded by a breaking political story. Request rates on the targeted routes exceeded their hourly baseline by a factor of 646 within 16 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
No customer-visible impact. The on-call engineer was notified and acknowledged the incident from the dashboard.
Recommendations
- Review allow-listed partner ranges quarterly.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.