Did you experience slow internet, with pages not loading or looking strange yesterday? You weren't alone.
Technical problems hit major websites this week as the global number of "routes" through the internet hit 512,000, a number many older commercial routers have set as the arbitrary upper limit.
The problems, which brought down websites such as eBay, could become a regular occurrence as the internet effectively runs out of space, experts have warned.
Technical faults could cost the economy millions in lost sales, it is estimated, because parts of the web are out-of-date and essentially "full".
eBay was inundated with complaints from traders who rely on the site, with many asking for compensation.
Analysts put the problem, which affected other major sites including telegraph.co.uk and password manager service LastPass, down to a little-known, but crucial part of the 'nuts and bolts' of the web called the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP.
BGP is essentially the 'route map' of the web, allowing internet firms and large networks to send information to each other via hundreds of thousands of complex paths.
When surfers visit a website, they rely on machines called routers to keep a table of known, trusted routes through the ever-expanding tangled web.
Now older routers are struggling to cope as smartphones and tablets allow more people to access the web, more of the time - meaning routers need to be updated to cope with the extra traffic because of a lack of memory and processing power.
Some machines impose an arbitrary upper limit of 512,000 different routes, a number that was reportedly reached earlier this week.
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I think it is too many photos being posted on multiple sites all over the web
