What broke the internet?
Did you experience slow internet, with pages not loading or looking strange yesterday? You weren't alone.
Web users across the world experienced major glitches on websites including eBay, and it's only going to get worse.
Experts say it may have been due to the number 512.
In layman's terms, there are only 512 ports to table data on the internet – 512 rows of 1000 ports to be exact – meaning the internet is nearing "full" capacity.
When the internet was being designed, programmers picked a random number – 512,000 routes – as an educated guess to futureproof for web traffic flow.
But now this old hardware has too little memory and slow processors cannot cope. And with an increasing number of people using the routers have hit their limits and it's causing the internet to jam.
"When you visit a website, that data bounces all over the world, through machines belonging to all manner of companies and organisations," explains The Telegraph's Matthew Sparkes.
"To make this work, (those) machines, called routers — large commercial versions of what you have at home — keep a table of known, trusted routes through the tangled web."
This is also known as the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, essentially the 'route map' of the web.
The problem is also partly to do with computers relying on outdated IP addresses, which are the unique code given to each computer or device. With the old numbers-only system still gradually being replaced by a newer alpha-numeric system, companies such as eBay could expect more problems, losing them millions of dollars.
"In that sense, it would be right to describe the internet as full because they are running out of IP addresses to go round," says James Gill, chief executive of internet traffic monitoring firm GoSquared.
"This definitely won't be the last we hear of BGP outages."
Morning news break – August 14
