I got the internet blowin’ up

I awoke this morning to find that a number of search engines/web portals were down: Google, Yahoo, and MSN were the big ones. Live‘s front page loads, but searches time out. Ask.com seems to be fully functional.
In addition, of the smaller search sites some are up, some down, some incredibly sluggish. What does it all mean?
Did the butler do it? Or someone more nefarious?