Take DNS. Originally, name resolution ocurred by matching names against the contents of the local hosts table (stored in /etc/hosts) and when a new host was added a new hosts table was propagated across the participating hosts. Eventually, this process became impossible, since hosts were being added too fast. This led, in the 80s, to the development of DNS, which eventually became the standard.
DNS, however, is a highly centralized system, and it was designed for a network a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than what we have today. The fact that it does work today is more a credit to sheer engineering prowess in implementation, rather than design, although the design was clearly excellent for its time.
Even today, if the root Internet clusters (those that serve the root domains) where to be seriously compromised), the Internet would last about a week until most of the cached DNS mappings expired. And then we'd all be back to typing IP numbers.
And there have been attacks on the root DNS servers. If I wasn't typing this at 30,000 feet, I'd have a ref hany from Google (and just imagine the search havoc if that service got hit). We rely on a number of centralize services on the net - and losing some of them would cause real problems. Something to ponder....
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