The term is quite over used in my opinion, it is very often used in hyperbole. Whether it is in terms of popularity and driving traffic to a website or a threat said to break the Internet, it doesn’t seem to live up to the meaning of the term.
11th September 2001 broke the internet. Every news site collapsed into text-only versions, email servers got overloaded as people tried to contact everyone they knew in NY/DC. I remember getting updates via a gossip forum that happened to have a user with a Reuters connection who copied the news as it came in. The BBC and CNN sites were completely useless.
One sad irony about the meltdown caused by the 9/11 attacks. The technology that could have prevented it is called CDN (content Delivery Network), one of the pioneers of this technology being Akamai. The irony is that one of the company’s founders, Daniel M. Lewin, was a victim of the attacks, he was on AA Flight 11, the first to hit the twin towers.
I don’t believe an event like that would have that impact today, though. The internet was still young then.
So, it would take an even more world-shattering event to overwhelm the Internet to the point that normal functions have to be downgraded to basic functions as a result.
Is it even possible to overload the Internet in that way anymore?
Yeah, let a nuclear bomb go off in any American city with over 50,000 residents.
That would probably do it
At that point, the EMP would wipe out some important components of the Internet as well as overloading whatever is not directly affected.
LOL, the internet was invented specifically to route communications around nuclear bomb blasts.
You got me wondering though, things have changed a lot since DARPANET. Taking out Amazon US-EAST-1 would leave a massive hole in the internet.
If you hit us-east-1 and us-west-2 I truly believe 95% of Western websites would not be fully functional. Most people either rely on, or rely on a service that in some way relies on those regions. Every time Lambda has gone down in IAD it takes with it many ordering applications and tons of physical badging systems around the country.
When the Elders Of The Internet allow someone to take the box with the internet from the London Tower, to show it at a shareholder meeting, only for the box to be accidentally crushed in a fistfight between a couple breaking up with each other, just because the woman was from Iran.
Its wireless.
Of course it is. Imagine having to climb over 300 meters to plug in an ethernet cable into the internet. Who would want that?
Ethernet only works up to 100m anyways.
An intense solar flare like the Carrington event with the right placement could probably take care of the net
I wonder how we would cope after it. Would, or even could we rebuild our infrastructure afterwards or would it end up sending us back to the 19th Century?
There was a really big homestuck cutscene (big as in important and highly anticipated, it was just a regular swf file) and so many people were trying to watch it on the mspa website that it died. So the video was mirrored from site to site with a roaming megaflock of homestuck fans following it and overloading every single one along the way. I never saw a higher number of mainstream sites be crippled simultaneously.
Severing one of those undersea fiber optic cables
A successful DDoS against Amazon Web Services.
Much of the Internet, as we westerners know it, runs off those servers. If that could be brought down for at least 5 hours…
Sharks chewing on the undersea cables causing outages across the globe.
I’d say, hypothetically, if gigantic corporations somehow managed to lock users into walled gardens and effectively destroyed the independent and decentralized nature of the Web as we know it.
Good thing that would never happen.
The general population entering internet and companies trying to take over to monetize internet.
“Ruin” is different from “broke”
In my defence, internet was setup to share information, openly. That’s broken now.
It’s ruined as well, but you’re right, semantics is important.
Gangnam Style - not quite the internet, but it got so many views that YouTube had to change the code used for displaying views count because it had more than 2,147,483,647 views (some of you may recognize it as the maximum number a signed 32 bit integer can store).
Did no one before that look at the schema and question the use of a signed int for a counter? That’s just bad design.
"No way a video gets more than 2 billion likes… "
It was a fairly reasonable guess back when they designed it, especially since you need an account to like a video.
That would mean close to 1/3 (~33%) of the world’s population "like"d the video.
Nowadays it’s only about 1/4 of the world’s population (25% for those who don’t get fractions).
It’d take massive amounts of bots to like a video that many times, and what would be the point?
Of course, they probably never imagined they’d scale quite this much.
It wasn’t the like counter they needed to change. It was the view counter.
