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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.
We might be safe from that insofar as... the only thing that would get the entire world's attention that rapt is something that would also kill enough people that the servers wouldn't get overloaded.
Oh man. Dark possibilities