Don't break out your shotgun, gas mask, and emergency rations, but make sure you know where they are: it looks like an enormous chunk of the Internet in North America is dead.
According to the Internet Traffic Report, which "monitors the flow of data around the world," we're in the midst of some kind of web apocalypse, with major network hubs across the continent completely dead—33% of all packets, the little bites of data that comprise all action on the Internet, are getting lost in transmission. This is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the same day Tumblr, Google, and Dropbox have all either gone down or reported outages, as The Next Web points out.
So what gives? What could trigger electronic death in buildings hundreds (thousands!) of miles apart, connected only by fiber optic cable? We're looking into it. In the meantime, let us know if you're noticing any network disaster—that is, if you can even read this.
Update: ICANN's Joe Abley says the sky is not falling: "Your note was the first I'd heard of anything. [Major networking conference] Nanog is silent, which seems unusual if anything really was happening." Or maybe the Internet is dying because everyone important is at a major networking conference!
Update 2: Internet overseer ARIN also reports all quiet on the web-stern front:
As far as ARIN can tell, the traffic levels to our public facing services (including DNS and Whois services) appear normal.