Case Study: Koo achieves secure, scalable API performance and bot protection with Cloudflare

Koo - Customer Case Study

Koo is an Indian multilingual microblogging platform that has grown rapidly to over 30 million downloads by giving users the ability to post and engage in regional languages. As the app scaled, Koo’s Site Reliability Engineering team faced urgent challenges: an API‑intensive, largely exposed backend, sudden traffic surges, bot and impersonation attacks, and costly vulnerabilities (e.g., SMS OTP abuse) that threatened performance and user trust.

Koo implemented Cloudflare within its first six months to secure APIs and endpoints, add WAF and bot management, apply rate limiting for OTPs, and use global edge caching and geolocation for faster, localized experiences. The result: Cloudflare blocks roughly 120 million malicious payloads per month, protects 2.5 billion API calls and 500 million site hits monthly, absorbs traffic spikes from viral events, reduces overage risk, and measurably improves performance and user retention.

Koo

Phaneesh Gururaj

Chief Technology Officer