Did someone cut the line?

The web is back online after being almost dead yesterday.
It seems that an undersea cable was cut or broke or something and so links between the UK and the states (ie the UK and the rest of the world) were severely hampered. Read all about it:

the register blames the cable
zdnet talks about where the cable is and why the problem was so bad
zdnet reports the outage

personally, I don't think it was a DOS attack - the net worked for some sites a little (and slowly) though others were completely unavailable. This would indicate to me that the ISP's servers were running but that the connection with outside world wasn't. This was especially apparent as BBC Online was running perfectly.
NTL's outage was even more complete - my friends on their network couldn't access anything.