Cloudflare reports 121% DDoS growth

Cloudflare said on February 5 that it mitigated 47.1 million distributed denial-of-service attacks in 2025, up 121% from 2024, according to its fourth-quarter threat report. The company said the increase came as network-layer attacks more than tripled to 34.4 million and as an 18-day campaign in the first quarter targeted both customers using Magic Transit and Cloudflare’s own infrastructure. (blog.cloudflare.com) Cloudflare disclosed the figures three months before reporting first-quarter 2026 revenue of $639.8 million and announcing a workforce reduction of more than 1,100 employees. (cloudflare.com) Chief Executive Matthew Prince said on the May 7 earnings release that the company was shifting to an “agentic AI-first operating model.” (fool.com) ### Where did the 121% figure come from? Cloudflare’s February 5 report said the company automatically mitigated an average of 5,376 DDoS attacks per hour in 2025 across its network. The company said total attacks more than doubled to 47.1 million, with the sharpest growth in network-layer attacks, which rose from 11.4 million in 2024 to 34.4 million in 2025. The report said about 13.5 million of those network-layer attacks were tied to an 18-day campaign in the first quarter of 2025. Cloudflare said 6.9 million attacks in that campaign targeted Magic Transit customers and 6.6 million targeted Cloudflare directly. (blog.cloudflare.com) ### What was hitting Cloudflare’s network? The fourth quarter of 2025 included what Cloudflare described as an “unprecedented bombardment” by the Aisuru-Kimwolf botnet. The company said the campaign, dubbed “The Night Before Christmas,” sent hyper-volumetric HTTP DDoS attacks exceeding 200 million requests per second and came weeks after a separate 31.4 terabits-per-second attack. (blog.cloudflare.com) Cloudflare said infected Android TVs were part of the botnet activity and that telecommunications companies were the most-attacked industry in the quarter. The company also said Hong Kong rose to the second most-targeted location and the United Kingdom climbed to sixth in the quarter. (blog.cloudflare.com) ### How does the AI build-out fit into this? Matthew Prince said on May 7 that AI was driving “a fundamental re-platforming of the Internet” and shaping demand for Cloudflare’s network and developer products. In the same earnings release, Prince said AI and agents had become core parts of Cloudflare’s own workforce and operating model. (blog.cloudflare.com) Cloudflare’s management said on the first-quarter earnings call that GPU utilization was “up in the 70% to 80%” range, a level it contrasted with single-digit utilization at hyperscalers. The company has also described an internal platform called Omni that runs multiple AI models on a single GPU and routes inference requests to edge nodes with available capacity. (blog.cloudflare.com) An August 2025 Cloudflare engineering post said Omni was built to “fully maximize” scarce GPU capacity and to place GPUs close to users and applications. The company said the system uses lightweight isolation and memory over-commitment so more models can run on each node. (cloudflare.com) ### Why did Cloudflare cut 1,100 jobs while revenue was rising? Cloudflare said on May 7 that first-quarter revenue rose 34% year over year to $639.8 million, while non-GAAP operating income increased to $73.1 million from $56.0 million a year earlier. The company also said free cash flow rose to $84.1 million from $52.9 million. (fool.com) The same day, management said Cloudflare would reduce headcount by more than 1,100 employees, or about 20% of staff, across functions and geographies. The company said the cuts were part of its move to an agentic AI-first operating model and said it expected $140 million to $150 million in restructuring charges in 2026, with most of that in the second quarter. (blog.cloudflare.com) ### What comes next for Cloudflare? Cloudflare said on May 7 that it expects second-quarter revenue of $664 million to $665 million and full-year 2026 revenue of $2.805 billion to $2.813 billion. Management also said network capital expenditures would account for 14% to 15% of revenue for the full year. (cloudflare.com) The next concrete checkpoint is Cloudflare’s second-quarter 2026 earnings report, which will show whether revenue growth, GPU-heavy infrastructure spending and the restructuring charges move in line with that guidance. (fool.com)