Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have become an unfortunate routine part of the modern internet, with botnets of compromised devices spreading ever wider. Unfortunately, the scale and frequency of those attacks have also been rising. The Aisuru-Kimwolf botnet recently smashed its previous record, hitting 31.4 Tb/s in December. To put it into perspective, that's bandwidth enough to stream nearly 2.2 million Netflix 4K movies at once.
An attack of that dimension is enough to easily knock many internet service providers offline, if not entire countries. In a blog post (via BleepingComputer), Cloudflare calls it an "unprecedented bombardment" targeting its customers, dashboard, and infrastructure. The company notes that these attacks are performed in a "hit-and-run" fashion, with gigantic bursts of traffic hitting everywhere at once, lasting from a few seconds to minutes.
