Is the Internet Down?

Right in the middle of our morning broadcast, the internet went down.
Well, not all of it... but it seemed like it here. The video stream from the WTLS studio stopped.  A second later the audio on the tune-in app went silent.
I picked up the phone and called WLTS. A recorded phone company message informed me the number was not in service. I monitor several computers in real time on my second desktop. A glance at the list showed them turning red, one by one. Next I went to the www.downdetector.com site. The big red hole in Alabama told me it was beyond my control. The yellow areas scattered all over told me something serious was happening. A quick glance at my RSS news feeds told me nothing. To I continued checking various other  web monitoring sites. Traffic seemed unusually high, then I found a site that looks for denial of service attacks. These attacks are form thousands or maybe millions of PC's infected with virusus. There were 11 different attacks in progress. It is rare that I see one or two. Microsoft and Google were up, but a lot of sites were dowm. In an hour, things returned to normal, but that evening when people got off work, the attacks and problems started again as people brought their home devices on line. By then the anti virus stuff had it under control.