You can check the Internet Traffic Report to see if there are any major outages in the offering.

It won't help your email issue, but you might also try switching to Open DNS. I did that awhile back and noticed a significant overall decrease in website load times.

Check DSLReports.com - they're really good about updating internet wide issues, as well as ISP specific ones.

From another thread, waaay back on the 6th -

According to that site (which I have kinda given up on), Florida and Arizona currently are completely without service.

Huh. My pirated WiFi has been working just fine. Maybe it's just affecting all you old schoolers who pay for access. :evil:

I dunno, I thought it was the weirdest thing... I could see my gmail flickering back and forth from service to nothing.

Then again, I was also having issues with my TV giving me background music but no VOICES on certain television programs in HD.

*cry*

I've been hearing voices in my head lately. Maybe that's where yours went.

However, my brain is nowhere near high definition, so I don't know...

Check your audio settings, maybe your surround system. Sounds like your center channel is what you're not hearing. If you don't have a center channel speaker, turn off 5.1 surround and go with reg'lar old stereo surround. :)

I don't have a center, and it's already on stereo, though I will double-check. The sound was only going out periodically, twice during the hour-long episode, and worked perfectly fine the rest of the time, so I'm not sure that's the problem, but it is worth checking.

I would double check the connections and settings. If you are wired to get sound on your television, I would check the TV audio when you get the problem. If the voices on available on the TV audio but not on your audio system, the problem is the latter.

Another question is: are you using a cable/satellite receiver for your HD? The receiver may be faulty. If the quick check above loses voice audio through the TV, then I would suspect a faulty receiver - it is not decoding the signal properly.