How Gcore kept Armenia's election broadcast online

Last week, Armenians went to the polls for the country's 2026 parliamentary elections. Like most national events of this scale, a significant part of the public's experience hinged on digital infrastructure — specifically, the live broadcast services that allow people to follow the vote in real time.

Behind the scenes, Ucom, one of Armenia's leading telecommunications providers, had been thinking carefully about what could go wrong.

The risk: disruption at the worst possible moment

Ucom operates the public-facing broadcast infrastructure that Armenia relies on during major national events. In the lead-up to the elections, their team identified a clear threat scenario: a sustained L3/L4 volumetric DDoS attack targeting the streaming platform at peak viewing hours. The kind of attack designed not to steal data, but to overwhelm capacity — causing timeouts, failed connections, and an outage exactly when trust in the process mattered most.

The challenge wasn't just finding a DDoS protection solution. It was finding one that could be deployed quickly, integrate cleanly with existing infrastructure, and stay operationally ready across the entire election period — without weeks of lead time.

Rapid deployment, measured in hours

Ucom had worked with Gcore before, but not at this scale or on this kind of timeline. What they needed was substantial distributed scrubbing capacity provisioned in days rather than weeks.

Gcore's Network Layer DDoS Protection met those requirements. The service was interconnected with Ucom's infrastructure and activated within a single day — the result of close technical coordination and a team prepared to move quickly when the situation called for it.

Ucom's infrastructure stayed fully available throughout election day. The public could follow the process live, without interruption.

That outcome — no disruption, no headlines, nothing going wrong — is exactly what this kind of infrastructure protection is designed to produce. The value isn't visible in the moment. It's in the fact that there's nothing to report.

What network layer DDoS protection actually does

Gcore's Network Layer DDoS Protection operates at L3/L4 — the network and transport layers where volumetric attacks do their damage. Rather than inspecting individual application requests, it analyzes and filters traffic at the infrastructure level, scrubbing malicious or anomalous volume before it ever reaches the protected network.

The key capabilities that made this deployment possible:

• Distributed scrubbing capacity. Gcore's global scrubbing infrastructure is distributed across multiple locations, which means mitigation doesn't rely on a single chokepoint. Traffic is cleaned close to where it originates, reducing both latency and the blast radius of any potential attack.
• Fast provisioning. Enterprise security engagements often move slowly. This one didn't. The ability to activate protection within 24 hours reflects both the architecture of the product and the operational model behind it.
• Continuous monitoring. Protection wasn't activated and left to run. Gcore's team maintained operational readiness throughout the election period, monitoring traffic patterns and remaining available to respond.

Resilience as a baseline, not a reaction

The Armenia case illustrates something that applies well beyond elections: for organizations managing high-visibility digital services, availability is now a core operational requirement, not just a technical preference.

Cyber resilience doesn't mean having a plan for when something goes wrong. It means being ready before the critical moment arrives. That requires the right infrastructure, the right partners, and the ability to move quickly when the window to prepare is short.

For Ucom, this engagement reinforced that digital resilience is no longer optional. For Gcore, it's a demonstration of what the combination of distributed infrastructure, fast provisioning, and close technical collaboration can deliver — even under time pressure.

Protection across every layer

Gcore's Network Layer DDoS Protection provides high-capacity, network-level mitigation against volumetric attacks for telecommunications providers, media platforms, public service operators, and enterprises running critical digital infrastructure. For organizations that also need protection at the application and API layers — against threats like SQL injection, bot abuse, and API attacks — Gcore's Web Application and API solution (WAAP) extends that protection to those layers. Learn more.