>My guess is that it's a combination of a LOT of variables. Cut cables, overloaded routers, etc. I was just chatting with our providor this morning and he said that their providor just went from OC3 to OC12 (if I have the terminology correct) which is 25MB to 100MB or so.
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>Personally I think the Internest is growing SO FAST that this will be the norm until the net achieces it's relative load level. Databases do the same thing. Gorw like crazy until they reach their optimum size, then fluctuate between a certain range record & size-wise.
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>Bottom line IMO: Growth pains

Agreed. Thinking this through a little more, I recall having heard it called the "domino effect" - I think this means there simply is not enough hardware to sustain the web consistently, and when one component at an important juncture goes down (say a router), rather than just cutting off traffic, the traffic is shifted to another router (for example) which becomes overburdened and shifts traffic to another, which becomes...you get the point :)

The problem is compounded by the fact that many web businesses are still operating in the red (or barely breaking even) and do not fund additional hardware (especially big projects like adding major hubs) until real disaster hits...

Well, we've still come a long way since (was it 1993?) when I'd log on to Prodigy with my hot new 50 Mz machine and 2.8 modem, and be excited when my web screen loaded in under a minute :)