We recently had this thing happen. We could get just about anywhere on the net except google and inktomi. Sounds like an internal problem. What it turned out to be is a routing anomoly on a router in Seattle. You might say so what but in this kind of scenario, even though our sites were up and we could get to all sorts of places, as far as the systems routing through Seattle were concerned (which included Google & Inktomi)we were down or intermittent. It is this kind of routing issue that can explain the unexplained times when a site is dropped for no apparent reason.
If you have a site that is heavily dependent on traffic from a certain engine whether it is google or some other engine, it is prudent to every few days check the routing from your web server to that engine. If you see any problems on the routing, look up the IP address owners (at arin . net) send them a notification of the routing issues and possibly a copy of the traceroute.
By the way, the way to check routing is to perform a traceroute, the command in win2k is tracert + ipaddress or domain name.
