Case Study: Wikimedia Foundation restores global access after massive DDoS with Cloudflare Magic Transit

Cloudflare Magic Transit Gets Wikimedia Back Online After Massive DDoS Attack

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia and related projects, faced a major availability crisis when a massive DDoS attack on September 7, 2019—peaking at hundreds of Gbps—rendered its sites inaccessible across multiple regions. Initial traffic engineering and GeoDNS mitigations failed to stop the outage, putting editors and readers worldwide offline.

Cloudflare activated Magic Transit to filter attack traffic at the network edge, measuring roughly 300 Gbps and tens to hundreds of millions of packets per second, and enabled Wikimedia to adjust routing to stop the floods. The service restored access quickly while preserving end-to-end encryption, keeping latency low compared with centralized scrubbing, and has become a foundational part of Wikimedia’s DDoS mitigation strategy.

Wikimedia Foundation

Grant Ingersoll

Chief Technology Officer