But it's not really true, is it? "The Internet", as in the network, was doing just fine. A large number of services that chose to build their business on the back of another were down, of course, but "a lot of the internet is down" is different than "a lot of websites are down".

If, say, Level 3 and Tata and Telia had a simultaneous outage, that would qualify for "a lot of the internet is down".