On Thursday 9 July 2026 at 22:58 UTC, a search endpoint flood targeted a online payments customer in North America. The attack peaked at 467.1 million requests per second and lasted 88 minutes. Traffic originated from 3074 autonomous systems in 46 countries, predominantly mobile carrier ranges.
| Vector | search endpoint flood |
| Peak | 467.1 million requests per second |
| Duration | 88 min |
| Time to mitigation | 0.402 s |
| Attack traffic reaching origin | 0.050% |
| 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 629 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 160 ms during the first minute, then normal service.
Recommendations
- Add a dedicated rate limit for the targeted route.
- Lower challenge thresholds on authentication endpoints during high-risk events.
- Enable log streaming to your SIEM for faster correlation.
Great write-up. We saw almost the same pattern on our login endpoint last month.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Verified good bots and allow-listed partners bypass challenges entirely.
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Thanks! Yes — the risk score and its components are included in every log record.
The billing model is what got our finance team on board, honestly.
Do you publish the edge IP ranges in a machine-readable format?
Carpet bombing is nasty. Good to see a clear explanation of it.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.
Nice to read a vendor blog that admits what went wrong.