Not sure about a large outage, but one of my recordings from around 9am had the "technical difficulties" message all throughout. Happened once earlier in the week as well.
It was nationwide. Issue with HD satellite. If you reset your box you lost everything it just got stuck trying to download info to the guide. Luckily by 4pm eat it was resolved. But I loved how DIRECTV didn't put out any news about it on their website.