Can Laravel handle high traffic APIs?

Yes. We have shipped Laravel APIs handling 80,000 plus loan applications per month with sub 120ms P95 latency. The standard scaling toolkit is Redis caching for hot data, queue workers through Horizon for heavy work, read replicas at the database layer, horizontal application scaling on Forge or Vapor, CDN at the edge, and rate limiting per token. For very high traffic systems we add CloudFront, asynchronous job processing, and circuit breakers for downstream services.