Educational experience when my ISP server goes down

Perhaps this should be in a different forum, so please move if felt desireable.
It is a long story so I will try to summarize.
I was online today around 20 hours GMT (4PM US EDT) when my PC went a bit nuts. I could not access internet sites and the PC ran very slowly.
I looked at my cable modem and saw that it was no longer online. I use Comcast, so that is not so unusual. The thing that really bothered me was the performance of the PC on normal offline programs (including Windows applications). They either were very slow or did not work at all.
The modem continued to show that it was trying to connect but could not. "By chance" a Comcast tech installing an "upgrade" was on my street and I brought the matter to his attention. He eventually called another Comcast tech who tried to convince me that problems with Comcast could not affect my hard drive and ability to run programs offline.
The first tech then got a phone call to tell us that a major server in the US was down. The Comcast techs left, since there "was nothing they could do ".
The modem eventually reconnected. And my PC's offline programs worked just fine again.
The main thing that bothers me is that a problem with a server (and perhaps that the modem was continuously trying to reconnect) caused such problems with offline applications.


P.S.Of course, I was also a little (not much) disappointed that the Comcast people were quick to tell me the problem could not have been caused by my/their internet connection

 

I had similiar problems awhile back when a PC that autochecks for AV updates when started for the first time in the day was turned on one day while the cable ( both TV and Internet ) was down.

It kept trying till I stopped it.

BillyBob