If were just talking about outages historically, I recall the 1996 AOL Email debacle, not really anything to do with network mishaps but more so DNS configuration.. 

As well, I believe the North East 2003 blackout was a great DR test that no one was expecting.

Of course we also have the big non-events too such as Y2K....

Regards
-Joe B. 


On Tue, Feb 16, 2021 at 1:38 PM John Kristoff <jtk@dataplane.org> wrote:
Friends,

I'd like to start a thread about the most famous and widespread Internet
operational issues, outages or implementation incompatibilities you
have seen.

Which examples would make up your top three?

To get things started, I'd suggest the AS 7007 event is perhaps  the
most notorious and likely to top many lists including mine.  So if
that is one for you I'm asking for just two more.

I'm particularly interested in this as the first step in developing a
future NANOG session.  I'd be particularly interested in any issues
that also identify key individuals that might still be around and
interested in participating in a retrospective.  I already have someone
that is willing to talk about AS 7007, which shouldn't be hard to guess
who.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions,

John