Working from home/ broadband woes

I’ve been working from home today. I stayed out of the office coz I’ve got a bad cold. It kept me awake half the night. 🙁
So I phoned in sick, but then worked from home anyway. That is until about 3PM when my broadband went down. 🙁
After much re booting of cable boxes and firewalls, it intermittently came back. Finally settling back to ‘on’ about 6pm.
I have no idea what was wrong. At one point, there was no light on the external NIC in the firewall, but I could ping the outside world from the firewall. Nothing else on the network could see the outside world though. Weird!