You forget that the vast majority of the web in the 2005 era was blogs hosted on wordpress by either service providers or shared hosting providers, neither of which dedicated significant attention to performance. Many of them were hitting quota limits, but many still were truly just going down because of the oversubscribed hardware they were running on. Even an independent server that was properly set up though could hit issues. I had a few of my posts get slashdotted at that time, and the spike was real. Apache hosting wordpress couldn't quite keep up with the spike - I had to use varnish to set up a reverse proxy cache to properly handle the influx.