Well, kinda. It was the first really big Internet meltdown that I recall.
That was the day that AOL had a 19-hour network downtime. It's been surprisingly hard to find news articles from the time that talk about it, but the key mistake that was made was AOL decided to update the software on their Cisco routers at the same time that the same was done on our upstream feed (ANS). In hindsight, I think the cascade failure was obvious, as was the fact that ANS was our Single Point Of Failure (SPOF) to access the outside world.
But there's another part to this picture that you don't see in the stories on C|Net, CBS News, etc.... That was the impact made on e-mail services around the world.
At the time, I was the Senior Internet Mail Administrator for AOL, and a few months before I had figured out how to cram about 40-50 MX records into a 512-byte UDP DNS packet. Your servers would query for the MXes for aol.com, and you'd get back a list for a.mx.aol.com, b.mx.aol.com, etc.... That would be a total of six or seven hosts, and each of those hosts would have six or seven IP addresses listed for them.
Under normal circumstances, this would mostly be okay. You'd query for the MXes, you'd get back the list, you'd try to make your connection on port 25, and after a couple of tries the odds were that you'd get through.
However, the TCP network standards required that you spend two minutes trying to connect to the first IP address, before you can proceed to the second. And in a pathological case, if all forty-five or so IP addresses timeout, then you've just spent about ninety minutes trying to send a single e-mail message to AOL.
If you have a queue retry period of sixty minutes, then when you still have another thirty minutes to go on that second message, you'll fire off another queue runner, and it will probably also get stuck sending a message to AOL.
Rinse and repeat enough times, and you fill up your RAM, your virtual memory, your swap space, and everything else you've got, all with queue runners that are stuck trying to get messages to AOL. Then your kernel panics, your system reboots, and you start the cycle all over again.
This happened across the entire Internet.
While the network layer itself finally came back up after about nineteen hours of downtime, it took about a week for the Internet e-mail backlogs around the world to finally recover.
Sanford Wallace was put out enough that he publicly claimed that I was trying to put him out of business, and then published the phone numbers for my desk and my home, and suggested that angry people call me up and tell me what they think of me.
I have been told that this event is the primary reason why qmail and postfix were created.