EDIT: thanks for all these brilliant responses. Hits great to get the various perspectives. Upvotes are on me!
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A lot of people are talking about all of the websites that failed for all kinds of various reasons, and yes, that started the dominoes falling, but the actual burst came as a result of that. Far more than just a ton of b2c (business to consumer, meaning the business sells straight to consumer) e-commerce websites and other sites that sprang up and failed, there were lots of b2b (business to business, meaning they sold software and services to businesses to help them sell to consumers) startups who had solid business models and real products that worked, which failed because many of their customers started to go away.
I myself worked for one of these. I worked for a rapidly growing startup that provided payment processing for those e-commerce sites. This was before PayPal existed, and at that time, for the most part, if a website wanted to sell something, they had to figure out how to do all of the credit card processing themselves. We were profitable, and on the path to IPO, and then all those companies started to fail, so we lost a lot of our customer base, and we failed.
There were other companies that started doing things like web hosting for those sites, other companies which provided assistance for the supply chain management, other companies for managing shipping, etc, etc. The dot com boom was a lot more than just websites selling stuff direct to consumers. It created all kinds of companies to support selling stuff direct to consumers. When those companies lost their customers, they also failed. THAT was the real bubble bursting.
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