How can you be so sure the hosts you were hitting with pings and traceroutes were the same hosts? It's quite possible smoke and mirrors were in between (smoke: web directors answering the pings... mirrors: anycast addressing with policy routing).

It's getting pretty wierd to debug IP these days...

sure, i was admittedly making some blind assumptions. i didn't check any dns entries. then again we've all seen a few other "media events" fall over and die because folks haven't done the server/os/app side very well. -brett