The long and short version is, if one of the connections that make up the backbone of the internet ever takes a dive, large chunks of the internet can potentially take that dive right behind it–it happens every once in a great while, usually because somebody cocked up. But sometimes, it can be triggered for any number of reasons. On Wednesday, it was denial of service time.
Now, these things can typically handle a hell of a lot of trafick. They’d have to, considering pretty much any and all internet trafick eventually passes through them to get, well, anywhere. So you’d think they’d be pretty close to difficult to attack. And you’d be right, more or less–the attack from Wednesday measured at, well, about , eh?
So if you were growing an issue or two on Wednesday, it could have been your local technology. It could have been your ISP mucking something up. Or, it very likely could have been that someone really did just try and break the internets. I might actually be somewhat vaguely impressed–if the attempt at calculating that bandwidth bill didn’t just cause my brain to implode. I hope these folks had uncapped connections…