I've been using Usenet and Newzbin/NZBmatrix for 4 or 5 years. New content has been getting taken down the past few months. Go look at the comment section of any new movie. It got progressively worse, to the point that I was starting to consider what to do next. I suppose I'm not surprised to see this this morning. But it was abrupt.
I was getting a good amount of missing blocks on Astraweb only; I bought a backup news account from blocknews and haven't had any missing block issues since.
I'll not jump ship until my downloads are frequently disrupted at the block level, across multiple providers. Pretty difficult to achieve, given the architecture.
Indices come and go... Much of the Usenet crowd know how to set up an indexer if need be. Perhaps a hidden service is warranted?