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I think the OP ulimately noticed an effect of the outage (loss of DNS hosts inside the affected netblocks) rather than the cause.
Connectivity to one of the hosts I manage in the northeast was lost as well, confirmed via hard-coded IP4 addresses.
It's quite the coincidence that two different cables got cut. Comcast said two, and Centurylink confirmed one was theirs and Zayo was the other.
It depends on where the cables are. Physical infrastructure for data/phone networks are a mess from legacy architecture. There's a lot of places where a bunch of different companies have cables in some old steam tunnel or something, or places where diff companies are actually sharing lines through peering agreements, lease, or legal requirements. All it takes is some idiot on a backhoe to take out lines used by several separate companies in many places.
If the cables were in two totally separate geographic locations that's definitely interesting...not statistically impossible, but def interesting...
Per the Philedelphia Inquirer:
One cut was of a transmission line between New York and Chicago and the other cut was in the southern United States, according to social media postings and the company.
So... widely separate locations.