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.
When there was a giant Ralph made up of virus clone Ralphs destroying everything in sight.
Good thing we have the power of friends or whatever.
I’M GONNA WRECK IT!!!
@Usernameblankface Some sort of attack that manages to take down Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, and Google Services at the same time. Would break a lot more than just the internet though.
A monumental data breach. We’re talking about something that dwarfs the Equifax, Ashley Madison and 23andme breaches by comparison.
Sharks chewing on the undersea cables causing outages across the globe.
Is this a thing that happens?
I’m surprised the cables are threatened more by animals than by national entities like North Korea. I guess nukes are where it’s at.
Often, from what I’ve heard.
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.
DNS outage will ways break the internet, that or BGP.
Or the root zone can’t get into their safe for the root certificate again (or can’t meet up due to pandemic)
Root zone for DNS is pretty reliable have you seen how many of those there are around the world? https://root-servers.org/
Root certs are generally offline for security reasons and everything is generated via the intermediate certs.
BGP has broken entire regions of AWS, GCP, and I believe Azure as well. I critical protocol that have disastrous effects if not absolutely perfect.
Explain like i’m a teenager, what’s BGP?
Highway map of the internet. BGP doesn’t care about the individual local roads just the highways or national roads between cities.
Say you want to get from your place (221B Baker St London) to the Eiffel Tower. BGP doesn’t care that you need to take a left at the end of your street then a right after 200m to get onto the highway. BGP cares that in London you get onto the A13 to Dover one in Dover get on the Eurostar to Callie, once at Callie take the E44 to Paris.
I’m pretty sure the day Michael Jackson died traffic was enough to overwhelm Google.
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 cam in. The BBC and CNN sites were completely useless.
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 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
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.
When somebody unplugs the router.
The Kerch bridge catching on fire again.
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.
The original answer is Kim Kardashian.
The phrase was popularized by appearing on the cover of the Winter 2014 issue of Paper magazine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_(magazine)#Breaktheinternet
you can see the cover here:
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/11/kim-kardashian-paper-magazine-nude-covers
In simplest terms, losing two or three tier 1 isp’s might do it.
a cute meme that many people talk about for over a week
