We had problems with numerous servers this morning that I tracked down to a problem with NIS, a network information system used to map user names to user IDs and vice versa as well as distribute password information, home directories, etc, across the servers.  This caused issues across the board with web servers, ftp, e-mail, login to any service.

     The immediate issue causing the outage has been resolved and I am going to make some changes to improve redundancy with this sub-system to prevent a future recurrence.