"We think of network access as a utility like the telephone or power, and in fact network access is just as important to our livelihood and household operation as those other utilities," said Ribble, who works for chipmaker Intel. The outage, he said, "virtually ground our work lives to a stop."

It's pretty lengthy and interesting discussing availability, government response, and all kinds of other stuff. Plus this news item has the added bonus of pushing my goofup on that Alice story down a little ways on the page.