you can get reliable data on the current state of the internet down to the local level? I know of the Internet Traffic Report, but that doesn’t seem to indicate that there’s anything wrong, and anyhow talking about North America as a whole seems a little broad to me.

I’m prompted by the problems that some folks in San Francisco seem to be having, but also because we had the same situation at work a couple of weeks ago when UUNet went down here in Montreal for 8+ hours. Our sites stayed up cause they’re cloned elsewhere, databases and all. But the ISP whose BoD I’m on had huge problems – their backup bandwidth from Videotron relied on UUNet as well (which was news to everyone).