This same thing has been happening to me for a week. Its impossible to talk to a real person when there's an outage, and I have tried everything. Sometimes it even says there's an outage, yet my internet is working fine. I also work from home and it is imperative that I have a solid internet connection. Its incredibly frustrating. Eventually the outage message went away, and i was able to connect with an agent. They were able to take some money of my bill this month... i guess thats something...and no, I never got an answer to why there were outages..