Last Friday, a coordinated attack of unknown origin brought down a broad swath of the web, cutting down sites from Github to Spotify to Twitter. Unlike thieves who steal data, this hack—known as a DDOS attack—just brings down websites by crippling the reference service called DNS. It’s like ripping up the phonebook.

In this case, someone was able to shut down a company called Dyn by capturing a massive number of computers and directing them at Dyn all at once. Here are the gory details.

Over the past year or so, someone with a lot of resources appears to have been probing the capabilities of major web sites. In strategically targeting Dyn, the attack highlighted the surprisingly vulnerable centralization that remains at the heart of web architecture.

You might hear otherwise, but the Dyn attack had nothing to do with the United States “giving away the internet,” as Republicans have suggested. ICANN declined to renew its contract with the Commerce Department, and will instead assume those responsibilities itself. A spokesman demurred poetically on the question of control, saying “It’s human nature that everybody wants to find out who is in charge ... but that is not something you can do with the Internet. Each other connects to each other.”

Four states suing the federal government to stop the ICANN handover dropped their suits Friday. 

From the Radiolab vault: “Darkode,” an episode with the story of a man who helped build botnets before turning his back on hacking. A botnet called Mirai was instrumental in Friday’s attack.