Well, the "internet" isn't like a land line/electricity. It goes down pretty consistently where I have lived for the last 10 years (Sunnyvale CA, San Mateo CA, Redwood City CA) - on both DSL and Cable (SBC, AT&T, Comcast) - sometimes for 2 to 3 days at a time. Indeed, the frequency with which Comcast's DNS server stops responding to me has me switching to 8.8.8.8 on a bi-montly basis (and screwing up all the CDNs at the same time).
Shutting down this rogue DNS server will have little to no serious consequence on people's lives - it's not like the "internet" is a reliable service. People who do need reliability, have things like SONET with dual-entrance, multiple providers, and multiple data centers located in separate disaster zones with aggressive power redundancy facilities.