Why would you default to that explanation? That’s not at all a reasonable default, and I say that as something pretty paranoid with regards to US surveillance
Looking at history, it's much more reasonable to assume there's surveillance, since there are whole branches of the government, and departments, that exist for surveillance in the goal of "national security", which this easily falls into. See Marissa Mayer explaining that it's not an option to refuse [1]. I assume this is just the same ole' Room 641A [2].
We already know there is surveillance, but why would you default to that explanation for a downtime? As said by others monitoring the traffic isn’t done by routing through the NSA monitoring system, it’s not a bottleneck that would take down all those services. If you look at more details such as the timing it’s even less likely to be the case, but even as a default it’s not a reasonable explanation given the symptoms
