Load testing is the practice of pushing a system with heavy or realistic traffic to see how it behaves under pressure. Security teams use it to measure capacity, response time, error rates, and failover behavior before users depend on the service. The goal is to find bottlenecks, weak dependencies, and configuration limits that normal testing may miss.
In cyber security, load testing matters because attacks and outages often create the same symptoms: slow logins, dropped sessions, timeouts, and partial service loss. A flood of legitimate users after an incident, a bot-driven login spike, or a deliberate denial-of-service attempt can expose whether identity systems, APIs, or control planes stay available. Defenders also use load tests to validate backups, scaling rules, and incident runbooks so recovery works under pressure, not just on paper.