My broadband was playing up a bit last night. I could access some sites OK (Amazon, Flickr) but not others (BBC, Skuds.org). My own connection out of the house was working, and the TV was working so it can’t have been this problem, although it may have been a knock-on effect – perhaps a Virgin DNS server was being swamped or something.
What a brilliant technical problem though! Routine maintenance caused thousands of modems and set-top boxes to lose their IP addresses, and then because so many of them requested new IP addresses at the same time Virgin’s routers just surrendered.
Yep, same thing happened to me, torrents were working okay, but very little web…