Why did the internet feel broken today, as in major websites, like netflix and spotify, were not accessible?

I only experienced it through small glitches, some parts of twitter not properly loading, and then a lot of people talking about not being able to reach some websites like paypal, etc.. In this shared experience of an outtake of several major sites it had a bit a quality of a déjà vu to me, a connection to February in 2000, when distributed attacks directly brought down yahoo and amazon and others simultaneously, a digital riot. It was a curious experience that day also, all these new web services were not accessible.

Listen to this 1998 Q/A on youtube about denial of service attacks against critical national access structures, the hacker group L0pht there famously described in the US Senate how they could bring down the entire internet in 30 minutes (it’s at 15:30 in the video). Today was the same approach as they describe it. It was not about flooding the single websites like in 2000, a punch which the cloud-structures would nowadays easily take and nothing would visibly happen in the eyes of consumers.

Today it was like L0pht described it 20 years ago, the approach was to flood the access structure, on the domain name level. According to security specialists, there is a rise in these kind of attacks with a constant testing of new levels, most probably made possible by all the new forms of devices connected to the internet, all these “smart” things.