Flakey Verizon Routers

Yesterday at around 10:00 p.m. local time my internet service broke down. According to what I was told, one of the main Verizon routers for this area failed, taking out all of Verizon's DSL service in DC and some surrounding areas. Repairs weren't even partially successful until some time between eight this morning and noon. Service is still intermittent. I know that Verizon operates with an unusually aggressive profit seeking sort of behavior, but I'm nevertheless surprised that they didn't build greater redundancy into their system. After all, they provide internet service for much of the nation's capital. I wonder how common this sort of outage would be elsewhere, outside the U.S.? Well, it's either a pathetic lapse or the NSA is installing some kind of new-fangled monitoring equipment... which would be just as bad. At least — thank heavens — the problem didn't happen on a Friday morning! (If you're wondering, this was why comments yesterday took so long to clear.)