During the first quarter of 2025, the total number of DDoS attacks increased by 198 percent compared to the last quarter of 2024 and by 358 percent compared to the same quarter last year, according to a new report by Cloudflare.
A total of 20.5 million DDoS attacks were stopped during the period, of which 6.6 million attacks were directly targeted at Cloudflare’s infrastructure. Apart from that, gaming servers were the most popular target for DDoS attacks, having affected popular titles including Counter-Strike: GO, Team Fortress 2, and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch.
The largest DDoS attack during the period was measured at 5.6 terabits per second, but has already been overtaken by an attack on April 24th that was measured at 5.8 terabits per second.
A DDoS attack is when a malicious actor floods a service with more requests than it can handle, which ties up its resources so badly that it can no longer function, bringing it down and making it unavailable. In the past, DDoS attacks have taken down large services like Spotify, GitHub, and even Microsoft services like Outlook and OneDrive.