in your opinion, what would meet the definition of "broke the Internet?"
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.
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?
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).
I mean, yeah, it is a bad design but you have to remember that YouTube wasn't always a Google owned service, this sounds exactly like the kind of thing that gets overlooked in a hobby project because no video ever will have more than 2 billion views, right?
So yeah, bad design but really easy to forget about for a video view counter.
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 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?
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.
@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.
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.
I think it's two meanings used in different situations.
One is literal with internet going down from either "the hug" or some other natural disaster happening to an endpoint.
The other is for hype, which is less spectacular, and to what I usually see as the same case "slam/ slammed" is used in news ex. "new ai that teases you while insulting your questions slammed the internet" (made up)
I vote for the first one but the second is happening from marketing so it is unavoidable.
I'd say if the action starts to affect those trying to use the internet for other purposes.
So if visits to X affect people's ability to do Y, then that might count. This would depend on scale (ex. a town might get overloaded more easily) and reasoning (ex. both X and Y used the same bottleneck service)
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.