The internet went down on Thursday: Heres what we know now

We're getting a better picture of what happened on Thursday, when large swaths of the internet went down. And it's painting a picture of how fragile our internet ecosystem really is when key cogs malfunction. One crucial fact to understand: Lots of commonly used sites and services rely on a few major hosting providers — and if something goes wrong, the downstream effects can prove substantial. As the outage event unfolded Thursday, early speculation centered around problems with two popula