Remember when the internet just stopped for a day in 2011?

I was in college and the whole campus basically froze on June 9th, 2011. The reason was a huge DDoS attack on a site called Pastebin, which a ton of forums and game servers used for sharing code snippets. For about 24 hours, trying to load any page that relied on it just gave you a broken image icon or a blank space. It was wild because you didn't realize how many little corners of the web were held together by one free service until it vanished. I spent the whole afternoon on my friend's couch, hitting refresh on different hobby forums and watching them slowly break. It felt like a preview of how fragile the whole online ecosystem was. Has anyone else got a story about a single site going down and taking a chunk of the early web with it?

3 comments

3 Comments

richardrodriguez2mo ago

Man, does that bring back a weird memory. My buddy was totally stuck trying to fix his car because all the forum guides he used for his old Honda had their wiring diagrams hosted on some random image hosting site that just blinked out one weekend. He had this garage full of parts and a laptop that kept showing that little broken picture icon. It really showed how much of that old web was built on these free, shaky foundations that everyone just trusted to always be there.

the_amy21d ago

That line about "shaky foundations that everyone just trusted" hits hard. I've definitely been there with workout programs I saved from blogs that just vanished overnight, taking all the good detail with them. It's crazy how much of our collective knowledge was basically stored on borrowed ground that could disappear any minute.

the_henry2mo ago

Actually that's why a lot of those old forum guys started uploading pics as attachments directly to the forum itself. The image hosts were always dying.