BT network outage

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

The joy of single provider service.  British Telecom lost most
of its national IP backbone on Tuesday affecting DSL and Dialup
service across multiple ISPs in the UK.  According to news
reports, this affected almost all DSL service in the UK.

What happened to BT?  Is this a unique "feature" of the UK marketplace
or can the same thing happen in the USA?