"Chances are, it's a power failure. The area reportedly had a significant storm yesterday. It's possible that the power failed and that they didn't have enough fuel or battery capacity or whatever to keep it running during an extended outage. That would also neatly explain why it reportedly came back and has reportedly died again."

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1676500&cid=324...

Sounds like it might not be a dead-man's switch if it just takes a large storm to knock it out.