Sunday night as we were preparing the evening meal the power blinked off for a few seconds for no known reason. The only evident results at the time were a few clocks that started blinking when the power returned. So we reset the clocks (all on ovens) and went on about our business.

When Monday morning arrived and I sat down at the computer to muse with my coffee. No connection to the outside world could be found. So I did what I always do in these situations, I pulled the plug on the gateway. Waited 15 seconds and plugged it back in. Waited for it to go through its power-up cycle…waited a while longer when I couldn’t find any indication of a connection to the internet…then repeated, and repeated, and repeated. Now I started to worry a bit so I logged in to the routers admin functions…everything was fine except it could not find a dsl signal. Since I had now killed almost all of my morning free time I just packed up and headed for work a bit earlier than usual. This was one of those times when I figured I’d look at it when I came home.

Of course, when I got home, there was no problem. Now trust me when I say, I had already figured it must have finally reset. I suspected this since I had not heard from my daughter about not being able to connect. I had heard from her on two other subject (which was unusual in itself) but not internet problems.

Now I see I wasn’t alone though this appears to have happened much later…

DSL outage knocks AT&T customers offline in Southeast | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle
SAN ANTONIO — AT&T Inc. customers in the Southeast United States were unable to connect to the Internet through their DSL service for several hours Monday night because of an equipment problem, a company spokesman said.

I was particularly intrested to note this comment…

Dave Burstein, editor of the industry newsletter DSL Prime, said broadband outages are not unusual.

“Broadband goes down much more often than telephone lines because they didn’t build the system for the same level of reliability,” Burstein said. “We do not know how often it happens, however, because they’re not obligated to report it.”

Time to wander through my email and a few friendly blogs…

About the time I tried to publish I was dead again…was it me or AT&T?