This time, it's actually the fault of Cogent, one of the major internet backbone providers. They provide about 2/3 of the bandwidth for the datacenter where xepher.net is hosted and it looks like a large chunk of their links went down. Anyway, it means slow speeds and major packet loss while they work to fix it.
I think they just now fixed it. Routes are back to normal (via cogent) and packet loss is currently at 0. I'll give it a few hours, then I'll downgrade the notice in the newsboxes. As to the cause, looks like cogent lost pretty much all of chicago due to a DoS attack. Considering this datacenter alone runs 20+ gigabits of cogent bandwidth... Man, I can only imagine the scale of such an attack. Frightening to see backbone links go down like that.
Yup, still looks good, and the datacenter claims the problems are fixed. I'm downgrading the newsbox announcement now.
*dust hands off*
well alrighty.