GitHub survived what was at the time the largest DDoS attack ever recorded. 1.35 TB/s of data was coming into the servers at once. It used a new type of DDoS attack, a no botnet attack. Models showed that they should be able to handle that much network traffic but ended up unable to do so. Having implemented specific mitigations allowed Akamai Prolexmic, GitHub’s DDoS mitigation service to quickly address the attack as a result of memcached servers which make it possible to do attacks with no botnet required.
