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.
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?
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 again)
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.
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.
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…
In simplest terms, losing two or three tier 1 isp’s might do it.
When somebody unplugs the router.
A monumental data breach. We’re talking about something that dwarfs the Equifax, Ashley Madison and 23andme breaches by comparison.
a cute meme that many people talk about for over a week
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.
When I setup a new system and type $ping ‘somewebaddrss’.org :(
The Kerch bridge catching on fire again.
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
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.
