It's the telecom's fault for not having open peering agreements between them (eg not free, not sharing traffic back and forth for no charge) and trying to graft circuit-switched ideas on the packet-switched network. It hurts redundancy.

The telecom companies violation of network neutrality and the end-to-end principle probably plays a role somewhere in this mess.

What does security have to do with downtime anyways?

Nice article Bill.

My kids had the same reaction as you regarding the Google fail. Their response: I didn't know that could happen?

Corporate and government users need to check the terms and conditions very carefully before relying on "the cloud" which is really someone's neighborhood IT company trying to make money. The cloud is tempting with "virtually free" backup, etc. Just know what to do if ....