There are a few candidates for the major outages this might be referencing. One would be the Dyn attack in 2016, which affected many major sites, though hit mostly North American users. However, the most likely answer here is the fallout from the Morris Worm in November 1988, which took down thousands of servers and caused a partition of the internet for a few days.

The worm was created by Robert Tappan Morris, who was then a graduate student at Cornell. He created it to probe for vulnerabilities in unix systems, and it was intended to be benign, but a design flaw resulted in it being able to infect systems multiple times, resulting in high resource utilization starving out system resources.