Those members of this forum who have unable to reach www.Dell.com for downloads and other support issues might find it helpful to know that 44 percent or more of Dell connections to Tech support are down for as much as a week due to an underseas communications cable that was cut somewhere between Egypt and India.
This means most attempts to connect to Dell Tech support from US based connections will fail with a blank screen.
This according to a telephone call we have recently placed with Dell in USA.
You can read about this sliced cable by searching Underseas cable cut on any major news network.

I I read about this in the morning paper. I would guess it's going to affect more than just Dell support and the time off may go as long as 2 weeks. Here is just one of the news stories about it: http://tinyurl.com/35snb5

There is no redundancy for this cable and it's just one more alert to potential problems as far as breaching communications connections.