NE US Cox outage

1. Why would a outage effecting a outside vendor cause modems to go offline? Does Cox use Level3 for internal routing? If so, doesn't that make it just as bad as VOIP?

2. Support had a outage page up, but it was broken. This is why the current outage system does not work. 

3. Why was Cox down for 6+ hours? Cox can't changing their routing? Or were they just too lazy?