What Could Cause A Nationwide Internet Outage?

Partial Map of the Internet, 2005 "Internet map 1024" by The Opte Project - Originally from the English Wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY 2.5. If you looked at the news or Twitter this morning -- or perhaps you couldn't, because your Internet was malfunctioning -- you might have heard: Time Warner suffered a major outage in its Internet service at about 4:30 a.m. Eastern. The outage, affecting much of the U.S., lasted two hours, Reuters reported. Maps created by the outage-tracker DownDetector sho...