Maximum PC

My Verizon DSL went dead at 9pm Sunday, August 7. The Westell modem worked normally but my Linksys router could not get an IP address.
Verizon workers went on strike 21 hours earlier.
Coincidence? I think not.

Anyway, a phone call this afternoon at 5pm with a very nice gentleman in India walked me through a bunch of things, and when nothing worked, he said he'd check something. He immediately came back and said that DSL service was definitely out in my area. He asked me how long I'd been down. When I said 20 hours, he said, "Oh, no, no, no, no. That's totally unacceptable". When I said "I just wanted to make sure that it wasn't anything here at home and was due to the strike." When he said, "What strike?" I told him, "Verizon has a work stoppage going on here in the United States. The electrical, maintenance and repair people are on strike."

The guy said, "WHAT?? Are you serious?" I said yes and he said in a very frightened voice, "Pardon me for just a moment, please. I must confirm this" and I got put on hold. A full five minutes later he came back and was hugely apologetic. "Sir, you are quite correct. Thank you for telling us. We did not know about this here at the call center. We will do everything we can to get your service back within 24 to 48 hours. We are very, very sorry". I said okay and hung up.

Within two minutes after I hung up, my DSL modem lamp started blinking showing it was disconnected. Within ten minutes, my DSL was back up. It's still quite slow (there's quite a lag between the time you enter a URL and get the webpage) but it's back again. Disabling IPv6 in WinXP sped things up a lot

Well, it sounds like everything works just fine.