I suspect there is more tech out there. 20 years ago we didn't have smartphones. 10 years ago, 20mbit on mobile was a good connection. Gigabit is common now, infrastructure no longer has the hurdles it used to, AI makes coding and design much easier, phones are ubiquitous and usage of them at all times (in the movies, out and dinner, driving) has become super normalised.

I suspect (although have not researched) that global traffic is up, by throughput but also by session count.

This contributes to a lot more awareness. Slack being down wasn't impactful when most tech companies didn't use Slack. An AWS outage was less relevant when the 10 apps (used to be websites) you use most didn't rely on a single AZ in AWS or you were on your phone less.

I think as a society it just has more impact than it used to.