Reviewing 2024 Q4 DDoS: interpreting a 5.6 Tbps peak
Cloudflare's January 2025 report highlights why attack peaks must be read alongside duration and protection scope.
Contents of this article
What happened
On January 21, 2025, Cloudflare published its 2024 Q4 DDoS report and disclosed mitigation of an attack peaking at 5.6 Tbps. This was an observation on that provider's network, not a protection guarantee for an individual WAFPRO plan.
Implications for website operations
Peak rate describes instantaneous pressure, while duration affects resource occupancy and recovery. Packet rate and connection churn describe other bottlenecks. For legitimate users, available bandwidth, origin routing and success rate may better reflect business impact. Compare these dimensions separately.
Operational next steps
Keep latency and error-rate baselines for critical APIs, and validate alerting, mitigation and recovery in authorized tests. After an incident, reconcile lost connections and transactions rather than recording only the traffic peak.