While what you said is correct, it has nothing to do with the topic. You can and should plan for failures but the magic of it is that you can't plan for everything. There will always be something you didn't think of.
Sure it does - you appear to fail at seeing that the original poster had no other recourse than post on ET.
I understand why the original poster posted. It helps to know if everyone else is facing an outage or the outage is specific to oneself in terms of figuring what the problem is.
OP didn't bother to try a backup system/connection, call the broker for support etc? If everybody who ever had an (undiagnosed) Internet connectivity problem posted here, there would be a flood of posts.
For some of them, it's a way of life. (In any event [and obvious to some], this was not a 1700ET 'flicker', but a flat-out outage. And only on some accounts. 3 hours south of Chicago, I did not see it. A friend 60 miles further south did. Haven't seen one for months, but glad it wasn't during (U.S.) market hours.
He posted further (scant) details about his "eventual" contact with IB well after he posted here. No initiative. No details about what he tried to do to fix the issue etc. Waste of our time.
He posed a question, and then posted of issue resolution, and then fielded ensuing attacks on his character and intellect. What drives some people to post .... is beyond me.
What drove me (and I can only speak for myself) were the inconsistencies similar to what @jharmon pointed out. It would have made sense to post right at the time when the claimed outage occurred to inquire whether others experienced similar if he did not get answers from IB right then. Posting hours later claiming he got an answer from IB made equally little sense to me. By the way all the other issues others reported they experienced with IB this week were not connection issues. At the time of the claim of disconnection all regional IB servers were fully functional. It's technically impossible for one user to experience a gateway outage but not for another user. That was what raised eyebrows for me.
None visible in this universe. Can't speak for yours. Precisely what he did. (In this universe. Can't speak for yours.) He posted 30 minutes after his initial post, and 10 minutes after he'd gotten intel from IB. (In this universe. Not in yours, I guess.) A thing impossible for you to know -- at least in this universe. But from those posters own words, it seems connections were lost. [My aforementioned trading buddy south of me {who also lost connection yesterday beyond the usual 1700ET flickers} is laughing at you. I am not, though.] Glad that in your universe, you showed all servers up. That was not the experience of others in *this* universe, despite your say-so. If your received server signal shows green, and theirs show red? Sorry, but their red tops your green. In this universe. Ummmmm... "Yeahhhhhhh." I'm out.