>Michel says there was an East Coast ISP down. Guess that's why it was the 3 California people who stayed live.

Here is the official word I just received from a contact:
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As you are probably aware, WorldCom our long distance carrier had a problem today in Wyoming that resulted in the disruption of over 400 DS3 circuits between the east and west coasts of the United States.

This problem has caused outages on parts of our network, and on the networks of UUNET, Agis, and others. Worldcom is working to correct this problem as rapidly as possible. If you have questions, please feel free to contact the Network Control Center (NCC).