> “The Internet" didn't break - Facebook broke access to their own networks by the rest of the Internet.
In fairness, the article lists a number of other outages, giving examples of where downtime with a single service has caused quite widespread disruption.
So “the Internet breaking” is being used as a colloquial term for the times when random bits of the Internet experience issues.
I actually didn’t think this was a bad article, and the “expert” quoted argues for more of a decentralised multi-node model to counter the increased centralisation that were currently seeing. That doesn’t strike me as a terrible viewpoint.
It is always dangerous when journalists go and interview a single academic or “expert” and then take that individual’s view as gospel on the topic and repeat it verbatim. That always annoys me. In this specific case I think the resulting article wasn’t too bad.
How I loathe articles like these - because they often lead to "solutions" that are worse than the "problem" they are trying to fix.