my internet provider-(at&t dsl) had to come out and provide me with a new modem today...

[dysfunctional press]

last night i was uploading some photos to a photobucket album for a friend, when a few seconds past midnight- i lost my internet. my modem showed a red light in the broadband link indicator, meaning it was down. my first thought, due to the timing 12:00am aug 1, was that it was some kind of pre-planned maintenance shutdown, but i unplugged the modem, waited and plugged it back in...still red.
so i decided to call at&t to see what the deal was. i waited on hold nearly 45 nimutes, until i spoke to a techie named george, and eventually his supervisor, mark(who both sounded suspiciously sub-continental for people with those surnames(:sarcasm:))
george eventually told me that it was a widespread outage in our area. mark, his supervisor said that it wasn't, and elevated it to a line maintenance issue, and that i'd need a service call. when i got handed back to george, he told me that the reason he thought it was a widespread outage was because of all the calls from the area he was getting with the same problem. which was also why i had to hold so long in the first place.
when i got up this morning, it was still out, so i called them again to set up a service call- since i had a 10:40 vet appointment for one of our cats- (she's got a grapefruit-sized tumor on her left shoulder), they were able to set me up for an afternoon service call.
when the tech guy gets there, he does this and that and tells me i need a new modem, that mine is shot. he also says that i'll need to have my email account & password info in order to set up the modem. i asked him why, as isn't that stuff stored on the computer and not the modem anyway...?
he tells me that with the new modems this is how it's now done- my modem that was being replaced was probably 5 or more years old.

what gets me, and keeps bugging me is the timing- just seconds past midnight...it sure seems to me that perhaps my older modem was no longer 'acceptable', and perhaps aug1 was the pre-arranged shut-down date for it and all other older ones like mine...?:shrug:
or am i just being paranoid, and the timing's a coinky-dink...?
and last question- did anybody else have to have their modem replaced today...?