I was in Owensboro KY today for a funeral and the experience was bizarre. Beforehand, I was WiFi tethering into my office, trying to commit some code. All of a sudden, it went down. I'm a cheapass on Straight talk, so that was my first suspect. Then I went to the funeral and asked to borrow a phone. Also dead. (Wordplay!) So was everyone else on all carriers. The only internet service was TWC through WiFi.
In my entire life, I've never experienced such a wide-ranging, universal outage for such a long time. 5 full hours in the middle of the day. Totally surreal.