I live in northwestern Alabama, and my Internet was out from about 7:30 last night to 11:45 this morning. I was wondering what could have caused such a prolonged outage.
First thoughts would be a cut cable, equipment failure, or power outage. Possibly an upgrade or maintenance gone awry, but they usually don't do those until after midnight.
I also experienced this outage, in Hamilton MT. I now notice my ping in games is 10ms higher than it normally is. Not a big deal, but something definitely happened on the network.