As stated previously, you're paying for a residential broadband service which has gone down accross multiple local regions throughout the past few days.
Clearly this isn't an acceptable level of service, but it's to be expected occasionally.
For those who claim that their internet service is crap etc. etc. How many times have you phoned / complained to them on each and every occasion the service goes down / fails.
I used to work for these people, believe me, their 'customer service' is crap, i've experienced it first hand. But what is interesting is that when 1 thing went wrong, a user would phone, complain that the service has gone down and has been terrible for the past <insert months / years here> and they're not happy.
Further checks reveal they have called about this issue once before 7 months ago where an outage caused temporary loss of service.
Suffice to say I no longer work for these people, I would still go by saying their internet service works well compared to my ADSL friends and colleagues. Their customer service however consistently fails to impress me.
Especially the stuff about browser settings / patches / computer settings... this isn't 2004 virgin, people don't have that much spyware anymore.
sherlock because more diagnosis is required other than ping tests and traceroutes.