It could be misleading. During the outage, I saw traceroutes like:

    1 someserver.in.europe 10ms 15ms 20ms
    2 someother.in.europe 50ms 60ms 50ms
    3 * * *
    4 * * *
    5 * * *
    6 * * *
    7 * * *
    8 * * *
    9 someserver.in.us * 500ms *
    10 * * *
    11 otherserver.in.us 900ms * *

So, it looks like for 10 and 11 hops we are losing a lot of traffic in the US, but that might as well be traffic that's lost in hop #3. The traceroute only tells you at some point between the start and hop #11 we lost 66% of the packets. It doesn't tell you where.