Throttling is the intentional reduction of network speed, packet flow, or request rate until a service becomes slow enough to be unreliable or unusable in practice. Unlike a full outage, throttling can leave a connection technically “up” while making messages, apps, or web pages arrive too late to matter. Cyber attackers use it to disrupt access without the visibility of a total blackout, and defenders may also apply it as a control to limit abuse, absorb load, or enforce policy.
In security operations, throttling matters because many systems depend on timely delivery. Push alerts, authentication prompts, command-and-control traffic, and emergency notifications can all fail when latency rises or throughput drops. Partial throttling is also harder to diagnose than a clean disconnect: a delayed message may look like congestion, application failure, or deliberate interference. For defenders, resilience means assuming that critical communications can be slowed, and building fallback paths such as SMS, cell broadcast, radio, or offline procedures.