Case Study: Carousell achieves secure, scalable handling of 3x traffic spikes with Cloudflare

Carousell - Customer Case Study

Carousell, founded in 2012, is a leading C2C marketplace across Southeast Asia with over 250 million listings and roughly a quarter of Singapore’s population using the platform. Serving about 1 PB of images per month and running AI-driven features, Carousell needed reliable uptime and fast page loads—especially during flash sales that drive 3x normal traffic—and faced escalating bot, DDoS, and other security threats that strained its previous CDN.

In 2016 Carousell moved DNS, SSL, and full asset caching to Cloudflare and adopted its WAF, bot mitigation, and DDoS protection. Cloudflare’s global edge caching and short-duration dynamic page caching let Carousell absorb traffic spikes without outages, deliver a smooth user experience, and block malicious traffic with no measurable latency impact. Key results include handling 3x sale-day traffic, about a 60% image bandwidth cache-hit ratio, ~50 Page Rules for traffic customization, and improved security and performance across the site.

Carousell

Harshad Rotithor

Software Architect