Cogent outage details?

am receiving word that Cogent has been the victim of "hardware problems on our backbone causing latency and packet loss to customers on the east coast". I did manage to get a master ticket number (608503), but I'm curious if anybody out there (perhaps an actual Cogent customer) has more details - backhoe? operator error? evaporating subatomic black hole? -- darkuncle@{gmail.com,darkuncle.net} || 0x5537F527 encrypted email to the latter address please http://darkuncle.net/pubkey.asc for public key