For reference, I wasn't able to access any of the affected sites until around 5pm on the day of the attack, and I don't even live in a big city, though I do liv

For reference, I wasn't able to access any of the affected sites until around 5pm on the day of the attack, and I don't even live in a big city, though I do live on the east coast. If you look at HN comments from posts about the attack while it was ongoing you can see plenty of people who were also affected by the attack (for example, people looking for name servers that cached longer than allowed, or opendns' smartcache). I understand why you think "the media" sensationalizes things, but in fact it is absolutely not complicit in saying things that are not true, even for the sake of embellishment (i.e. look at what happened to Brian Williams).