I do not know how the internet works, or what the problem was, but I did have trouble earlier tonight. Only some sites were affected.
What did Earthlink’s tech support say when you called them?

Apparently others around Wash DC having problems.
http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/earthlink.net.html
I’ve been dealing with an apparent DNS problem of theirs for the last week or so on their DSL service. They don’t seem to be able to get a reference beyond the first page of a site. Solution has been escape/f5 repeated for as many layers deep as the page is.
Oh.. just noticed reference to dialup. Ran into that a while back, it was related to EL asking for password and not getting it.
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-chat/3133484/posts
Can they see the cat picture, without dns.
"a little stray tries to bribe her way indoors - imgur" → http://54.225.125.247/gallery/qc2dbUF
What about a link that is possibly not in their dns cache.