Your sense of mechanical sympathy is not aligned with the advances in hardware and internet infrastructure. It would be possible to handle a 1.2tbps DDOS in a

Your sense of mechanical sympathy is not aligned with the advances in hardware and internet infrastructure. It would be possible to handle a 1.2tbps DDOS in a single IX like LON, AMS, FRA, LGA, IAD, ORD, ATL, MIA, SJC, LAX, SIN, HKG, ICN, KIX let alone world wide. It would take a lot more active management and work across companies if someone is clogging regional interconnect to a spoke, but that would not cause worldwide outage. 1.2tbps is 120 of Verisign's 2013 server and code, maybe a million dollars CapEx. And 12 100g peering ports, $150k monthly at bulk transit pricing if you can't do any settlement free for some reason. Yes there are other costs, but it is easy to scale and well within the means of midsize business let alone unicorns. The thing about DDOS -- it's a lot harder to get aggregate bandwidth, those eyeball networks will bottleneck a lot sooner than 1000 meter runs of fiber between peers at an IX. And there are some natural imbalanced ratios like CDNs that are sitting on dozens of tbps of unused ingress that can jump into offering services for other companies that don't want to figure it all out.