Case Study: italki achieves robust DDoS protection and bot management with Cloudflare

Cloudflare is the first line of defense for tens of millions of italki language learners worldwide

italki is the leading global online language-learning community, connecting more than 30,000 teachers and tens of millions of students across 190+ countries. Because human connection and uptime are core to its service, platform stability and security are critical — especially after an HTTP flood DDoS attack once knocked the site offline for over five hours, degrading user experience and costing nearly $1 million.

To protect learners and content, italki adopted Cloudflare’s edge security and performance stack — including WAF, DDoS protection, Rate Limiting, Bot Management and Workers — to block indiscriminate attacks, stop content scraping, and simplify migration. The result: Cloudflare blocks roughly 5 million malicious attacks for italki each month, provides always-on DDoS protection and bot mitigation, and lets italki focus on building features for learners rather than battling bots.

italki

Spark Liu

Technical Director