How Cloudflare auto-mitigated world record 3.8 Tbps DDoS attack

Since early September, Cloudflare has been combating a month-long campaign of hyper-volumetric L3/4 DDoS attacks, mitigating over one hundred such attacks throughout the month. The largest attack peaked at 3.8 Tbps, which is the largest ever disclosed publicly by any organization. Cloudflare's autonomous detection and mitigation systems have been able to handle these monstrous attacks without impacting performance for their customers. The scale and frequency of these attacks are unprecedented, with the ability to take down unprotected Internet properties or those protected by on-premise equipment or cloud providers that lack sufficient network capacity or global coverage.