The company just reported that 46 million requests per second were made to shut down one of its Cloud Armor customers. As a result, it is the largest Layer 7 distributed denial of service attack ever reported, and Google's infrastructure handled the surge in traffic very well. As Google explained, a single Wikipedia visit equivalent to an entire day's worth was made in just 10 seconds during this attack. The fact that Wikipedia could withstand such a powerful DDoS attack is an impressive feat of stability given its popularity.

A load-balancing technique used by Google Cloud Armor prevents web services from being interrupted even in the face of attacks of this type. The Cloud Armor claims to be able to handle over a million queries per second but did so in this case despite 46 million queries being a crushing burden.

Approximately 10 minutes after the attack began at 9:45 a.m. PT on June 1, it reached a peak that was 76 percent higher than the previously reported record. According to Google, Cloud Armor had already detected the DDoS attack and recommended a blocking rule to the customer. Perhaps after the hacker realized that the attempt had failed, the requests stopped coming in. As part of its Adaptive Protection program, Google analyzes normal traffic patterns to establish a baseline to compare against, so we know where we're starting from.

It was possible to detect the attack in its early stages, allowing us to take quick action to block it and prevent it from disrupting the business. This record, however, might not last much longer since Google reports that the volume of DDoS attacks is rapidly increasing, fueled by armies of malicious bots, so it is likely that this record won't last all that long.