This AP story appeared this morning:
The CIA is conducting a secretive war game, dubbed “Silent Horizon,” this week to practice defending against an electronic assault on the same scale as the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks.
The three-day exercise, ending Thursday, was meant to test the ability of government and industry to respond to escalating Internet disruptions over many months, according to participants. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the CIA asked them not to disclose details of the sensitive exercise taking place in Charlottesville, Va., about two hours southwest of Washington.
Yesterday, my broadband provider, Cox Communications, was responding erratically all day. At the end of the day, it went offline in my neighborhood for more than an hour. When I called support, a recorded message described similar outages throughout the greater Phoenix area.
Coincidence? You tell me. Given the reverse Midas touch that U.S. intelligence services have demonstrated in recent years, I’m inclined to think they could screw up the Internet more effectively than any group of cyber-terrorists.
Ed Bott 
Our T1 service in Pasadena has been flakey during this test period too. Prior to this week, it’s been running reliably for months. This week we’ve had dozens of brief outages, as noticed by our monitoring service, which pings our server every 15 minutes from somewhere back east. (Of course, the problem could be closer to their end than to ours–perhaps somewhere close to Charlottesville, VA.)
Hmmm…