When the Entire Internet Seems to Break At Once
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3483202/posts
From the article/thread:
“For more than two hours on Friday morning, much of the web seemed to grind to a halt—or at least slow to dial-up speed—for many users in the United States.
More than a dozen major websites experienced outages and other technical problems, according to user reports and the web-tracking site downdetector.com. They included The New York Times, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, Tumblr, Spotify, PayPal, Verizon, Comcast, EA, the Playstation network, and others.
How was it possible to take down all those sites at once?”
Its being done! Paul Joseph is posting on twitter and I’m being stopped. Isn’t Paul in London?
If the originator of their DNS lookup assignment is swamped, then all the places that report address assignment (who aren't swamped), can't confirm the address assignment when the lookup expires. Many of the websites have darn short lifetime (a minute or so) on the lookups. Lookup lifetime is "if the last time you looked up this address was (a minute ago), I'm going to look it up again."