3.47 terabit DDoS attack on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform countered

Large-scale DDoS attacks just don’t stop. After the PlayStation Network in 2014 and Amazon’s cloud AWS in 2020, Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure had to withstand a record-breaking DDoS attack with a peak bandwidth of 3.47 Tbit/s, which the company was able to successfully counter, according to a recent report.

Microsoft Azure withstands record DDoS attack

According to a report on the subject of DDoS attacks, Microsoft had to beat off nearly 360,000 DDoS attacks against its own infra structure in the second half of 2021. This included a record-breaking 3.47 terabit bandwidth attack against the Azure cloud platform. Never before has such a high bandwidth been measured in a DDoS attack, Microsoft reveals.

The attack took place in November 2021 on the Asian Azure service. In the process, 340 million data packets per second are said to have hit the servers, which were executed simultaneously by around 10,000 devices distributed all over the world. In total, the attack is said to have lasted around 15 minutes.

It is not known whether several attacks took place simultaneously as part of the record DDoS attack or whether a single group managed to realize such a volume of data. However, Microsoft had managed to redirect and distribute the traffic thanks to extensive protective measures, which meant there were no outages on its Azure cloud platform.

Microsoft: 2,000 attacks per day

With around 360,000 DDoS attacks in the second half of 2021 on Microsoft’s infrastructure, there had been a whopping 43 percent increase compared to the first half of the year, according to the report.

There are said to be an average of about 2,000 attacks against the company per day. That marks a 40 percent increase compared to the first half of 2021. About 54 percent of all DDoS attacks against companies focus on the U.S., while Europe comes in at just under six percent.