I work at a company that serves up incredible amounts of data over the internet (millions of emails, VOIP, SMS, Push, etc. every day). Over the last two months, we have had ridiculous amounts of intermittent trouble with slow pings to our servers all over the country. One day, things to the north-east US will come to a crawl and have terrible packet loss and tons of failed connections. Then, the next day, the north-east will be fine and the same thing will start happening out west. Data centers will drop and come back up for no reason. We keep getting random occurances of traffic backing up and only being able to push through a couple of meg at a time, so we reroute it and it moves just fine.
We have dozens of open trouble tickets with Level 3, Comcast, Charter, Century Link, Windstream... but they all keep saying, "Everything seems to be working OK today, so let us know if it happens again."
We've been in this business for 12 years and have never seen things so messed up.