Every news website had major outages that day, I don't know details but I wouldn't be surprised if they were dealing with 100x or 1000x their normal traffic and

Every news website had major outages that day, I don't know details but I wouldn't be surprised if they were dealing with 100x or 1000x their normal traffic and they existed in a world before you could just push the scale up button on your AWS/GCP panel. It's also very likely that your ISP had backhaul issues, and myraid other issues existed related to capacity.