Wha' ha' happened was...
It sounds like one or more ePO management servers went tits-up for a time. That would prevent new policies and tasks from being sent to machines as well as any metrics from being gathered centrally, but it would not prevent the existing software from running client-side. It also would not prevent DAT files (AV or otherwise) from being pulled directly from McAfee, the default last resort repository, unless previously specified by policy in which case they could still be updated manually.
The point of this framework is that it can suffer an outage of this nature and still continue to provide protection.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
