Outages
The problems were certainly widespread yesterday - The problems I saw seemed to be with DNS - I actually had to re boot my router - It had crashed through packet overload.
We must be careful in describing the INTERNET as a marvel - As a system overall; its still too vulnerable to DDOS attacks - I bet we will not hear too much in the media about the outages.
Never loose sight of the fact that the TCP/IP architecture has its origins as a distributive, and in this context, resilient self healing, data network in a limited military domain of servers.
We have built an information & marketing structure on an inherently insecure, chaotic structure without a authentication layer.
DDOS against a simple target (Commercial hosts are far more complex beasts) is comparatively simple still.
CAT III