The power went out last night for large parts (EDIT: 80% corrected) of Europe for about half an hour. The reason is apparently: they were moving a cruise line ship out of the construction dock in central Germany, and it must pass under a major power line. Regulations stipulate that this power line must be turned off before such a ship passes under it.

For some reason, shutting it off this time triggered a cascade affect across Europe, knocking most of the grid offline.

I have been seeing real big DNS problems all day here in Germany. About half of the domain names I enter just don't work. Could this be just my local ISP with a bad UPS solution, or is it really so simple to screw up Europes Internet as to take out one powerline?