Because it is just the timing that makes you say this, and I highly doubt the city of Seattle can - on a moments notice, no less - pull the plug on any residential internet connection.
If true, that would be a far bigger news item than the rest of your story.
Think about it: you see your internet connection dying as proof when they could have just as easily booted you from the conference call raising much less suspicion. I see it as proof of the opposite, they had a far easier and more direct means at their disposal to achieve the effect you say they desired. So I really do not believe that it was anything other than bad timing, all that it would take for this to happen is for your provider to reset a router somewhere.
My residential connection here is pretty good, even so it goes up and down at least once every week or so whenever some firmware update is pushed to the router.
My phone was dead at the time, so I was using my desktop with google hangouts for the call. I was not booted from the call. My internet died. End of story.
I work from home, so my internet going down is a big deal for my livelihood and all that. I'm not saying that something suspicious happened, but I figured it was an interesting thing to happen. You're frankly thinking into it too much.
