The article says it was a 45 second attack. I used to run a high profile website which used to get a lot of 90 second attacks. Best I could figure was some of the ddos as a services would give a short attack as a free sample, and people picked us cause we were high profile. Thankfully, these would almost always attack our website rather than our service, and availability for our website didn't really matter. Most of the attacks weren't a big deal, and they'd get bored and move on to something else. The ones that did take a web server down were kind of nice... I could use those to tune both the webservers and the servers doing real work.

I don't know who the provider is, but the attack was almost certainly not targeting the provider, but a site hosted on their platform. Many hosting companies upsell their customers into stuff like providing Cloudflare DDoS prevention. The target site was probably something political or controversial. I work at a hosting provider and we deal with this type of thing constantly.