Ok, first, I have to say that I never expected to see "The interwebs are borked" become a national thing. Every where I've worked, at some point folks would start wandering around saying "the internet is down" which was code for "help us, we can't use the web" and various folks would then figure out what their particular issue was, then that problem migrated to my home when we got always on 24/7 internet, something that started out "why would I use that?" has become like oxygen "ZOMG I can't get to the webz!" and here we have an interesting variant on it that a transit monitoring service notes a lot of disruption. Clearly whom ever is currently the current CIO of the US [1] is not doing their job :-)

That said, there are no doubt folks on the other side of those down links with calls in to three or four NOCs, a couple of trouble tickets being escalated, and people driving out to non-nondescript buildings near railroad tracks and in industrial areas carrying weird looking devices which can measure the intensity of laser light and do time-domain reflectometry (TDR) measurements. We can only wait and see what they discover. If we were playing the Ops edition of the game Clue I'd guess "Colonel Mustard with a Backhoe in New Jersey" :-)

[1] http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2011/nr11-124.h...