c3rn: Must be running pretty powerful systems or have a massive botnet to launch such attacks?

I'm afraid that we don't have anything we can share that substantiates global effects. I'm sure you read the same 300gbps figure that I did, and while that's a massive amount of bandwidth to a single enterprise or service provider, data on global capacities from sources like TeleGeography show lit capacities in the tbps range in most all regions of the world. I side with you questioning if it shook the global internet.

We believe that the DDOS attack potentially had severe impacts on the websites it was directed at, however, according to our data, the Internet as a whole did not experience a wide spread disruption.

Just to put it in perspective the traffic estimates for the DDOS attack were as high as 300 Gbps at the target. That would easily overwhelm the average hosting center, but not a core component of the Internet. For example, DECIX, the German Internet exchange in Frankfurt, regularly handles 2.5 Tbps at peak on any given day: http://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/

While it may have severely affected the websites it was targeted at, the global Internet as a whole was not impacted by this localized incident.

First off I can confirm a few basic facts, namely that we really did 
receive a ~300 Gbps attack directed at Cloudflare, and later 
specifically targeted at pieces of our core infrastructure. This is 
definitely on the large end of the scale as far as DoS attacks go, but 
I wouldn't call it "record smashing" or "game changing" in any special 
way. It's just another large attack, maybe 10-15% larger than other 
similar ones we've seen in the past, and I'm certain we will continue 
to see even larger ones in the future as global traffic levels 
increase. What made this particular attack notable is where it was 
targeted, which greatly increased the number of people who noticed it.

Anybody know why Orcon Genius is wide open and allows DNS resolution? I'm browsing the net using somebody's Orcon IP right now..
— Steve Biddle (@stevebiddle) March 28, 2013