Major Network outage

Its a bad bad start to the day. I go into the office, connect to all the
servers I need and check my mail everything seems normal until I try to
connect to orkut. No connection, Im a little pissed. I open the relevent
server tab on mrxvt and ping google.com, no response. I ping the default
gateway for the machine no response still. I rush into the server room and
immediately check the router all the lights are blinking as they are
supposed to Link, DSL and ethernet. I check the ethernet cable on the
server, seems allright. As a last try I restart the router. No nothing
works. Why did the fastest connection in the office had to go down. As I
am thinking I would have to settle for a 256kbps connection I get another
shock. The connection on the proxy server isn't working. Now what? Last
option the unused 128kbps failover connection . I get it connected and
change the settings as soon as I ping my heart sinks its not working as
well the only connection alive in the office is the Tata connection to the
mail server. Then it dawns upon me that there's a problem with the Airtel
connections and since the problem is with Airtel's connection to internet
and not my connection to Airtel the router do not show any sign of a
problem.
I call up Airtel their response: "Sir the Airtel network is down and its
not a problem with your connection.". I ask how long it will take to be
up? "Sir it might take 30 minutes or maybe an hour" I hear that as Our
network has got badly fucked up and it might take half a day to be
repaired. Everything I have learned and experienced about redundancy and
failover connections has come to a nought. I'd love to know what caused
this outage. But perhaps sadly I never will.