DDoS

Distributed denial of service — flooding a site with more requests than it can answer, from many sources at once so no single one can be blocked, until legitimate readers cannot get through; the distributed part is what makes it an infrastructure problem rather than a firewall rule

The defense is upstream of the application: an edge network with more capacity than the attack (Cloudflare’s free tier absorbs the ordinary kind), rate limits that answer 429 before the origin is asked, and a cache that serves the flood a stale page instead of a fresh render. An application can make itself cheap to flood — a route that does real work for an unauthenticated GET is the target — which is one reason the AI routes are member-gated and the analytics reports are cached.