<b>The news site that DDoSed its own origin</b>

<b>The news site that DDoSed its own origin</b>

A mid-size sports outlet had 14 CDN edge regions and a single origin in Virginia. When a playoff result broke, every region's cache expired the article within the same minute. All 14 nodes hit the origin at once — a cache stampede that spiked origin CPU to 100% and served 502s to readers worldwide for four minutes.

The edges were doing their job; nobody sat between them and the origin. We enabled origin shield in Ashburn, making it the single parent every edge talked to. Now one node fetches from origin; the other 13 pull from the shield.

Origin requests during the next breaking story dropped from ~14 simultaneous to 1. Origin CPU peaked at 22%. No 502s.

The number that mattered: 14 origin hits collapsed to 1.