Well, that’s certainly an effective way to cut down on spam.
Nothing like a 10 hour backbone outage to cut way back on the number of times the spam zombies batter themselves against my antispam barriers. Thanks, AT&T! Now if you could only do this without, um, losing your routers (normally a cold shudder of terror would ripple down my back when I see a traceroute going through sprintlink, but when the alternative is things coming to a grinding stop at the point where everything connected through to at&t, the sprint hopshuffle doesn't seem to bad anymore) and taking everything at pell off the net for long enough to have the big ISPs start either (a) bouncing or (b) sending "helpful" we've-not-sent-your-mail-yet-but-we'll-keep-trying! messages [I'm looking at you, google -- I know that sendmail isn't written in p*th*n, but someone in your PhD-laden Redmond-clone HQ should have already figured out that when a user sees the "helpful" warning message, all they can see is that their mail didn't get delivered so SOMETHING IS HORRIBLY WRONG!!!?!?!!™ (and do they send the complaints about this to the Googleborg? No, they do not. They send the complaints to me, and since they're my users I can't very well snap "if I got this mail, then you can safely assume that the network is functional again" at them)] I'd be, if not happy, at least not quite so homicidally disgruntled about the whole thing.
Sigh.