Starting Post: With 9000 Guardsmen maximizing the $50,000 signing cap, that's ~$450,000,000 tied up

The article notes they were 2 x 10-month outages. "whereby staff tracked payments on dry-erase boards" (for two years...)

I provide ThousandEyes for comparison. [1]

[1] https://www.thousandeyes.com/outages/