On Monday 16 March 2026 at 20:40 UTC, a HTTP GET flood targeted a fashion retail customer in North America. The attack peaked at 492.8 million requests per second and lasted 53 minutes. Traffic originated from 938 autonomous systems in 117 countries, predominantly residential proxy networks.
| Vector | HTTP GET flood |
| Peak | 492.8 million requests per second |
| Duration | 53 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.031 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.057% |
| Legitimate traffic challenged | 0.34% |
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 538 within 30 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 143 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Keep origin IPs out of public DNS history.
- Enable authenticated origin pulls.