Rogers goes down. Ears turn red

News from Pitkinville - okay, southern Ontario, but Pitkinville sounds so much more sardonic - is that Rogers, the largest telecom company in the known universe, is experiencing a major outage. As a result, Internet users in Canada's most populous zone are stuck sending each other messages via carrier pigeon.

I know this to be true because I learned it all on the Internet - TechCrunch article here. Which, for me, apparently still works. Because I'm not using Rogers. Please don't hate me.

Your turn: What do you do when your Internet goes down? I lean toward reading, walking and speaking with real, live people. What's your backup plan?

Update - 9:00 p.m. - Heard from Melissa James on Facebook. She sat on the phone waiting for someone from Rogers. When she got through, this is what she was told: "It'ss not just Rogers customers, but Bell and others because it's a DNS problem. If you type in Google's IP address (74.125.226.84 ) and it appears, your service with your provider is fine, just the internet (DNS) is down." This is confirmed by one of the top telecom analysts I know, Mark Tauschek: "Apparently DNS is the culprit - try 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 for DNS servers." So...change your DNS settings and you should be fine.

Update - 9:04 p.m. - Stuart Clark and Derek Silva - more uber-geeky members of our city's technology elite, and friends of mine - share this advice: Use OpenDNS's DNS servers. 208.67.222.222 & 208.67.220.220. Derek - head honcho of Orpheum - also says "it's just Rogers' DNS servers that are flaky, not the network itself."

Update - 9:12 p.m. - Tom confirms the following: "Using openDNS settings 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 and working well now."

Update - 9:15 p.m. - CTV anchor Tony Grace just tweeted this: ROGERS OUTAGE: MP @tonyclementcpc, tech expert @carmilevy & others among the many tweeting about a widespread #Rogers internet outage today.

Update - 9:17 p.m. - Leanne Fenton reports from London: "Cable seems back with a reboot and twitter is working on WIFI for the 1st time in hours... Still sketchy access on most sites tho."

Update - 9:20 p.m. - Stuart Clark just posted this update to his blog.

Update - 9:27 p.m. - Just noticed the one tweet from Rogers on this issue. Follow @RogersHelps and re-read that single tweet if it'll make you feel better.

Update - 9:29 p.m. - Hallie Moyse, in whose house I pretty much grew up, reports possible spread to Montreal. Tracking comments on my Facebook page here.

Update 9:31 p.m. - Oops, I spoke too soon. @RogersHelps just tweeted again. TWO tweets. I hope they're paid by the word.

Update - 9:34 p.m. - TechCrunch reporting service returning for some. Article updated here.

Update - 9:50 p.m. - DSLreports.com community thread here.

Update - 9:53 p.m. - Darrell Etherington is the Toronto-based TechCrunch writer who's covering this story. Follow him on Twitter at @drizzled.

Update - 9:55 p.m. - Rogers reporting the following from its Twitter account (link):

"Internet issues some wireline / wireless customers were experiencing should now be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience."

What are you seeing?