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Eurovision.tv Taken down with DDoS, brought back online by Cloudflare
Technology Category
- Cybersecurity & Privacy - Network Security
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Telecommunications
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Cybersecurity
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Cybersecurity Services
The Challenge
During the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest semi final, the busiest time of year for the website, Eurovision.tv was targeted with a large DDoS attack. Their content delivery network provider at that time could only do very little to mitigate the attack, and because they were using a CDN, their hosting partner couldn’t do much filtering either. The first flood of attack traffic was mitigated with some blocking techniques implemented by their CDN, but when the attack got more creative there was nothing more they could do. During the first semi-final, fans of the Eurovision Song Contest access the website to find out results and to watch online streams of the contest. With the site service disrupting, visitors from around the world to Eurovision.tv experienced difficulty accessing these results and streams.
About The Customer
The Eurovision Song Contest is an annual international song competition, held every year since 1956 by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) with participants representing primarily European countries. Each participating country submits an original song to be performed on live television and radio, then casts votes for the other countries' songs to determine the winner. The contest reached 170 million television viewers worldwide in 2013. Participants from about 40 countries perform an original song, and a combination of public vote and national juries decide who continues on from the semi-finals to the Grand Final. Past winners of Eurovision include Celine Dion, the best-selling Canadian artist of all time, and ABBA, the most successful group to ever to take part in the contest.
The Solution
Eurovision.tv reached out to Cloudflare for help. Cloudflare mitigated the DDoS attack and the site was brought back online. The editorial team and Eurovision.tv’s visitors immediately noticed the site was back in business. Cloudflare not only mitigated the DDoS attack, but also increased Eurovision.tv’s performance, providing a noticeable improvement in load time to everyone who visits the site. With security and performance taken care of, the Eurovision Song Contest was able to get rid of their old CDN service and rely entirely on Cloudflare. As the Eurovision Song Contest used the service more, they discovered additional features that made their lives easier. Eurovision.tv used Page Rules to cache additional content on Cloudflare’s edge, speeding up delivery without sacrificing up-to-the-minute updates during the global event.
Operational Impact
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