<b>The viral post that DDoSed its own origin</b>

<b>The viral post that DDoSed its own origin</b>

A single 4 GB video on a creator's site went viral out of Seoul. Within twenty minutes 30,000 viewers hit it, and because the file wasn't cached yet, every edge node independently dialed origin for the same bytes. The origin, a modest box in Virginia, saw 600 simultaneous full-file pulls and fell over. The CDN was technically up; the source was dead.

We enabled origin shield with request coalescing. A single designated shield node now fetches a cold object once while every other edge waits on that one fill. 600 stampeding requests collapsed into one.

Origin bandwidth during the next viral spike peaked at 40 Mbps instead of saturating a 1 Gbps line. Origin CPU stayed under 15%. The video served 2.1 million views off the edge with the source barely breathing.

The number that mattered: 600 origin pulls became 1.