If you do a bit more digging the ISP is not Lumen ... It is a well known ISP and I recall reading about this outage when it happened. I don’t know if indeed this was a botched attempt to gather a bot network or like some said an intentional act to get attention.

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-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+rjacobs=pslightwave.com@nanog.org> On Behalf Of Christopher Morrow
Sent: Monday, June 3, 2024 1:04 PM
To: Matt Erculiani <merculiani@gmail.com>
Cc: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
Subject: Re: 600,000 routers bricked

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On Mon, Jun 3, 2024 at 1:40 PM Matt Erculiani <merculiani@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It's important to note though that if you quietly (or even publicly) patch 600k devices to fix a bug, nobody cares. Plus, doing so is still a crime: it's 600k instances of accessing a computer system without permission. It's also far, FAR easier to write a stream of 0s to the bootloader than it is to decompile and debug bad firmware.
>

Lumen USED TO HAVE a walled-garden they dropped people into when their links/network ran amok.. at least in legacy-qwest/century-link consumer connectivity situations.
maybe that's gone now?
maybe the part of the affected network for this incident didn't have that capability?