Read the Docs said it experienced the largest DDoS attack in its history in mid to late June 2026, a distributed denial-of-service attack. At its peak, the attack exceeded 5.5 million requests per minute, about 100 times the service’s normal traffic level.

According to Read the Docs, the incident lasted nearly ten days. The company writes that the attackers deliberately chose URLs that caused cache misses, including nonexistent pages and temporary redirects.

Read the Docs writes that it relied on rate limits, targeted challenges, more caching, and moving features to the network edge.

Claim check:

  • Read the Docs said it experienced the largest DDoS attack in its history in mid to late June 2026. (confirmed by the publication itself: evidence; «In mid-to-late June 2026, Read the Docs experienced the largest and most sophisticated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in our history.»)
  • The attack peak exceeded 5.5 million requests per minute, about 100 times Read the Docs’ normal traffic level. (confirmed by the publication itself: evidence; «At its peak, our infrastructure was hit with over 5.5 million requests per minute , about 100 times our normal baseline traffic.»)
  • According to Read the Docs, the incident lasted nearly ten days. (confirmed by the publication itself: evidence; «The incident lasted for nearly ten days,»)
  • Read the Docs writes that attackers deliberately chose URLs with cache misses, including nonexistent pages and temporary redirects. (confirmed by the publication itself: evidence; «Attackers found and deliberately targeted URLs that resulted in cache misses, such as non-existent pages with unique paths (404s) as well as temporary redirects (302s).»)
  • Read the Docs writes that it relied on rate limits, targeted challenges, more caching, and moving features to the network edge. (confirmed by the publication itself: evidence; «Instead, we relied on rate limiting and targeted challenges combined with more caching and pushing more features out to the edge.»)

Primary sources:

score 72.2 · kind incident · revision 1 · stories st-1kalw2n