Case Study: New York City Housing Authority delivers a secure, scalable housing assistance app with Cloudflare

New York City Housing Authority secures 1.5 million-applicant rollout with Cloudflare

The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) needed to build a cloud-native application to handle an expected massive surge of users for its first Section 8 housing voucher waitlist opening in 15 years. Their challenge was to ensure the application remained secure, performant, and accessible for hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users without crashing. They turned to Cloudflare for its content delivery network (CDN) and Waiting Room functionality to manage traffic and provide security.

By implementing Cloudflare's platform, including its CDN, Waiting Room, Web Application Firewall, and DDoS mitigation, NYCHA successfully managed the application launch. Cloudflare blocked over 250,000 attacks on the first day and enabled the app to handle 1.5 million users, who submitted over 600,000 applications without any performance issues. The solution also provided real-time control over user traffic and resulted in a 30% reduction in backend infrastructure costs.

New York City Housing Authority