The headlines yesterday were earth-shattering, with tech blogs and news agencies screaming in unison about how the “Largest ever cyberattack slows the internet for millions”, or the “Global Internet slows after biggest attack in history”. Even I was caught off guard with my own report, “CyberBunker Launches World’s Largest DDoS Attack, Slows Down the Entire Internet”.

But in actual fact, it seems that not a lot actually happened. Could it be that yesterday’s top story was nothing but a clever PR stunt that had us all hooked?

It sure looks that way now.

The hype all began with a company called CloudFlare, which we should note specializes in DDoS attack mitigation and was called in by Spamhaus to help it fend off the attack by CyberBunker (which apparently was for real, by the way). According to CloudFlare, the attack quickly escalated into something far more deadly than just an attempted takedown of one of the more controversial web organizations around, with CyberBunker’s unprecedented efforts “almost breaking the internet”, causing widespread disruption for millions of web users.

Except that, as Sam Biddle of Gizmodo’s neat investigation following the apocalyptic headlines found out, it didn’t. Not even slightly.

By the way, how’s the internet been for you over the past week? Noticed any dramatic slowdowns recently? Struggled to access Netflix at all? No?

Well apparently neither has anyone else. Very few people (no more than usual anyway) complained about the internet being slow, or sites being inaccessible. No-one complained that Netflix was down. Web monitoring organizations like Renesys found zero evidence of the internet cracking under the strain.  Giants like Amazon didn’t even flinch. In fact, the only people who reported anything at all were those who stood to gain from publicizing the so-called event – namely CloudFlare and Spamhaus.

Questioned by Biddle, representatives from both Renesys and NTT, one of the Tier-1 operators that maintains the web’s basic infrastructure, confirmed that while the attack took place and was certainly one of the largest DDoS attacks ever seen, it didn’t even come close to bringing the web to a screeching halt.

Biddle’s conclusion? The entire affair was nothing but a cynical ploy  by CloudFlare to advertise its business. Simply put, there’s no way a simple DDoS attack using the techniques employed by CyberBunker could take down the entire web. Indeed, all the evidence from this week suggests that anyone looking to achieve that would be far better off doing things the old fashioned way – just cut a few cables and have done with it.