in your opinion, what would meet the definition of "broke the Internet?"

11th September 2001 broke the internet. Every news site collapsed into text-only versions, email servers got overloaded as people tried to contact everyone they knew in NY/DC. I remember getting updates via a gossip forum that happened to have a user with a Reuters connection who copied the news as it came in. The BBC and CNN sites were completely useless.

One sad irony about the meltdown caused by the 9/11 attacks. The technology that could have prevented it is called CDN (content Delivery Network), one of the pioneers of this technology being Akamai. The irony is that one of the company's founders, Daniel M. Lewin, was a victim of the attacks, he was on AA Flight 11, the first to hit the twin towers.
I don't believe an event like that would have that impact today, though. The internet was still young then.
- So, it would take an even more world-shattering event to overwhelm the Internet to the point that normal functions have to be downgraded to basic functions as a result.
  
  Is it even possible to overload the Internet in that way anymore?

Sharks chewing on the undersea cables causing outages across the globe.

Is this a thing that happens?
- It happened at least once.
- Often, from what I've heard.

Gangnam Style - not quite the internet, but it got so many views that YouTube had to change the code used for displaying views count because it had more than 2,147,483,647 views (some of you may recognize it as the maximum number a signed 32 bit integer can store).

Yeah, I think that was the last viral thing that was so popular that it (even in this small way) broke the Internet.
Did no one before that look at the schema and question the use of a signed int for a counter? That’s just bad design.
- "No way a video gets more than 2 billion likes... "
- I mean, yeah, it is a bad design but you have to remember that YouTube wasn't always a Google owned service, this sounds exactly like the kind of thing that gets overlooked in a hobby project because no video ever will have more than 2 billion views, right?
  
  So yeah, bad design but really easy to forget about for a video view counter.
- The guy who made that code is probably loooong gone to another job. And it worked before.

DNS outage will ways break the internet, that or BGP.

BGP has broken entire regions of AWS, GCP, and I believe Azure as well. I critical protocol that have disastrous effects if not absolutely perfect.
Or the root zone can't get into their safe for the root certificate again (or can't meet up due to pandemic again)
- Root zone for DNS is pretty reliable have you seen how many of those there are around the world? https://root-servers.org/
  
  Root certs are generally offline for security reasons and everything is generated via the intermediate certs.
Explain like i’m a teenager, what’s BGP?
- Highway map of the internet. BGP doesn't care about the individual local roads just the highways or national roads between cities.
  
  Say you want to get from your place (221B Baker St London) to the Eiffel Tower. BGP doesn't care that you need to take a left at the end of your street then a right after 200m to get onto the highway. BGP cares that in London you get onto the A13 to Dover one in Dover get on the Eurostar to Callie, once at Callie take the E44 to Paris.

An intense solar flare like the Carrington event with the right placement could probably take care of the net

I wonder how we would cope after it. Would, or even could we rebuild our infrastructure afterwards or would it end up sending us back to the 19th Century?

A successful DDoS against Amazon Web Services.

Much of the Internet, as we westerners know it, runs off those servers. If that could be brought down for at least 5 hours...

@Usernameblankface Some sort of attack that manages to take down Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, and Google Services at the same time. Would break a lot more than just the internet though.

When the Elders Of The Internet allow someone to take the box with the internet from the London Tower, to show it at a shareholder meeting, only for the box to be accidentally crushed in a fistfight between a couple breaking up with each other, just because the woman was from Iran.

Its wireless.
- Of course it is. Imagine having to climb over 300 meters to plug in an ethernet cable into the internet. Who would want that?
  
  Ethernet only works up to 100m anyways.

I'd say, hypothetically, if gigantic corporations somehow managed to lock users into walled gardens and effectively destroyed the independent and decentralized nature of the Web as we know it.

Good thing that would never happen.

Oh yeah, that would totally never happen.

When there was a giant Ralph made up of virus clone Ralphs destroying everything in sight.

Good thing we have the power of friends or whatever.

I'M GONNA WRECK IT!!!

In simplest terms, losing two or three tier 1 isp’s might do it.

Severing one of those undersea fiber optic cables

I think it's two meanings used in different situations.

One is literal with internet going down from either "the hug" or some other natural disaster happening to an endpoint.

The other is for hype, which is less spectacular, and to what I usually see as the same case "slam/ slammed" is used in news ex. "new ai that teases you while insulting your questions slammed the internet" (made up)

I vote for the first one but the second is happening from marketing so it is unavoidable.

The Log4Shell virus.

When somebody unplugs the router.

I'm pretty sure the day Michael Jackson died traffic was enough to overwhelm Google.

I'd say if the action starts to affect those trying to use the internet for other purposes.

So if visits to X affect people's ability to do Y, then that might count. This would depend on scale (ex. a town might get overloaded more easily) and reasoning (ex. both X and Y used the same bottleneck service)

Maybe?

A monumental data breach. We're talking about something that dwarfs the Equifax, Ashley Madison and 23andme breaches by comparison.

The general population entering internet and companies trying to take over to monetize internet.

"Ruin" is different from "broke"
- In my defence, internet was setup to share information, openly. That's broken now.
  
  It's ruined as well, but you're right, semantics is important.

When I setup a new system and type $ping 'somewebaddrss'.org :(

There was a really big homestuck cutscene (big as in important and highly anticipated, it was just a regular swf file) and so many people were trying to watch it on the mspa website that it died. So the video was mirrored from site to site with a roaming megaflock of homestuck fans following it and overloading every single one along the way. I never saw a higher number of mainstream sites be crippled simultaneously.