In a world where a single point of failure can throw our machines into chaos, everything from sharks to authoritarian governments to old ladies have brought the web to its knees.
One of the earliest major outages came in 1997 thanks to a glitch at the company Network Solutions Inc., one of the main registrars that issues domain names for websites. According to the New York Times, a misconfigured database crashed every single website ending in .com or .net. It took down around one million sites, which at that point in history was a huge portion of the web.
In 2011, a 75-year-old woman took all 2.9 million Armenians offline when she sliced through that cable with a spade near the Georgian village of Ksani. The woman, who was scavenging for copper at the time, was arrested but reportedly let go soon after because of her advanced age.
VIA BBC