IB customer disservice confirmed to me that there was indeed a limited outage, fortunately strictly confined to only those customers who desperately needed to exit their positions.
I have been having TWS disconnects every few minutes since 12:00 AM EST. IB,s system status says their have been no reported problems.
That was the first thing I checked. All other data feeds and trading platforms on this PC plus other PC's on the internet connection were working OK. Just TWS that was logging off every few minutes. TWS connection OK now.