DDoS attacks that used to look like a siege now feel a lot more like a flash flood.

Attackers have traded prolonged bombardments for short, violent bursts – traffic spikes that hit in 30 to 60 seconds and vanish before a human even gets paged. You can’t manually triage an attack that’s already over before you’ve had a chance to open Slack.

Here’s how three very different platforms, a nonprofit EdTech giant, an ecommerce performance company, and a global DXP provider, use Fastly’s DDoS Protection to keep their traffic legitimate, their uptime intact, and their teams out of war-room mode.

Khan Academy: Blocking a 17,000% Traffic Spike Without Lifting a Finger

Khan Academy delivers free education to millions of students worldwide, many connecting over unreliable networks where every millisecond counts. That makes uptime a non-negotiable and (unfortunately) it makes Khan Academy a target.

The company’s infrastructure team was already fighting off millions of bot-driven login attempts a day when they turned on Fastly’s DDoS Protection, powered by the Adaptive Threat Engine. The product has to tell the difference between an actual assault and the massive, legitimate traffic swings that Khan Academy sees during global training events.

"We've seen DDoS Protection activate multiple times, like during an attempted attack where traffic spiked by over 17,000%, and it automatically blocked the malicious surge before it ever reached our core services," said Miguel Castillo, Staff Software Engineer at Khan Academy.

Confidence in Fastly’s performance pushed the team to adopt Bot Management and Fastly’s Next Gen WAF and to consider moving more services to Fastly Compute.

Read the full story: Khan Academy delivers free education to millions with Fastly’s Edge Cloud Platform

Yottaa: Smoothing Out Attacks That End Before Anyone Notices

Yottaa manages performance and security for more than 1500 ecommerce storefronts, including high-end fashion brands and fast-growing startups. The attacks they saw came in too quickly to handle with a slower response, regardless of how big they were.

"We've been able to use Fastly DDoS protection to essentially smooth that out and automatically mitigate that bad traffic so that the sites can continuously run and service their customers," said Ben Trafton, VP Client Services at Yottaa.

Short-burst attacks that hit and disappear in under a minute often break manual response. There’s no time to open a ticket, let alone act on it. Fastly builds intelligent traffic baselines on the fly and neutralizes the spikes automatically, which matters most heading into the holiday season, Yottaa’s self-described “Super Bowl”.

Combined with a zero-false-positive track record on the Next-Gen WAF, Yottaa has handed its clients something rarer than raw speed: peace of mind. “I’m not worried about things going bump in the night,” Trafton said.

Read the full story: Yottaa delivers blazing fast, AI-secured e-commerce experiences at the edge

Magnolia: Protecting 450 Customers with One Flip of a Switch

Magnolia’s digital experience platform hosts more than 250 clusters for 450 customers and 200 partners, with a client list that skews towards finance and government, two of the internet’s most targeted verticals. When a large banking customer came under a multi-day DDoS attack, Magnolia didn’t scramble to set up a response team. They flipped on Fastly’s blocking mode.

"These attacks tend to come in very quick bursts, so the speed of the response is very important for us," said Jan Haderka, CISO and CTO at Magnolia. The Adaptive Threat Engine validated traffic legitimacy in near real time, letting Magnolia isolate the attack and hold its 99.9% uptime SLA without missing a beat.

Magnolia blocks 3.2 million attack requests every month, across hundreds of security events. It runs as a shared platform, so a rule written for one customer protects every customer on the platform instantly.

Read the full story: Magnolia cuts operational costs while securing digital experiences at the edge

Why Automation Wins Against Modern DDoS Attacks

Khan Academy, Yottaa, and Magnolia are just a few of the businesses using Fastly’s platform to stop DDoS attacks before they impact uptime, without babysitting a dashboard. Check out our other customer stories to see what Fastly can do for your business.

Want to see how Fastly’s DDoS Protection would handle your traffic? Talk to our team about what automatic mitigation looks for your specific patterns – no war room required.