Our website is getting slammed with traffic, what's the first step to take?

The absolute first step is to immediately implement upstream filtering by enabling your hosting provider's DDoS mitigation service or routing traffic through a cloud-based scrubbing center. Restarting services is ineffective because volumetric attacks saturate your network bandwidth before traffic even reaches the server. Your priority is to divert this flood away from your origin server's IP. Contact your host's emergency support line *now* and request they enable their on-demand protection; they can often null-route the attack traffic at the network edge. If you have a service like Cloudflare, quickly change your DNS A/AAAA records to point to their proxy IPs to leverage their global anycast network for absorption. The core concept is moving the mitigation point away from your overwhelmed server to a dedicated, high-capacity network designed to filter malicious packets.