Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are designed to knock a website offline by flooding it with huge amounts of requests until it crashes.
In February, the DDoS attack had fired 2.3Tbps, which is a little under half of all traffic BT sees on its entire UK network during a normal working day. The previous record, set in 2018, was1.7Tbps.
DoS attacks are relatively simple in nature and rely on their sheer scale to be effective. They often utilise large numbers of machines compromised by malware to launch attacks, which can be purchased online from cyber-criminals relatively cheaply.
However, protection services such as AWS Shield, Cloudflare, and Akamai, among others, have been used by many major online services in an attempt to limit their effectiveness.
As for Amazon, it says its online cloud, which provides the infrastructure on which many websites rely, has fended off the largest DDoS attack in history. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53093611?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cz4pr2gd85qt/cyber-security&link_location=live-reporting-story
