Severe network problems afflict Second Life grid

At present, very little on the Second Life grid is working. At 2:20AM SLT (US Pacific time) with 30,818 users online, a severe network failure at one of Linden Lab's Internet Service Providers (finger points to Level 3), has largely cut access to the San Francisco data-center (one of three such facilities in the USA where Second Life servers reside). The network failure is not complete, so there are moments where everything almost works for short periods.

While an outage or communications problem at any data center or between any pair of them causes significant problems for Linden Lab's virtual world grid, the San Francisco center appears to be far more important to effective grid functions than the other two. As yet there is no estimated time to restoration, but users are advised to do nothing with money or inventory in the meantime, and are unlikely to be able to travel. Instant messages may also experience significant problems.

Update: (5:05AM SLT) Linden Lab reports this as resolved, but warns things will be slow as the systems recover.

Update: (6:50AM SLT) Everything seems to be falling apart again. It appears to be for much the same reason.

Update: (7:05AM SLT) As noted below, logins were closed at 7:05AM.

Update: (9:00AM SLT) Logins still remain closed, and the network provider is still working on restoring function.

Update: (9:30AM SLT) Logins are open, but very slow.

Update: (10:00AM SLT) Linden Lab reports this as resolved. Again.