Net outage?

I could not reach www.cypress.com, slashdot.org, newsforge.com,
www.foxnews.com. Trace routes to these servers gets a ways and then times
out. Anyone else seeing this?

It is a curious thing to me when these things happen.    A site that produces
close to real time status of the net, outages and such, would be interesting
to look at.  Is there such a place?

Alan