On this day in 1997 the world experienced one of its first major Internet disruptions when a programming error temporarily caused a major email outage. On the morning of July 17, 1997 a system operator accidentally uploaded a corrupt database to the Internet’s root domain servers. This made it impossible to send email or access the Web within the .com or .net domains until the problem was fixed– which took about 4 hours. Though a relatively short period of time, within it millions of email messages had already failed to send.
This event made two things pretty clear: how dependent we’ve become on the Internet, and how widespread the disruption to it one small human error could cause.