Weird, why would it fail after reaching the US?

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.

You can also get * on traceroutes (step 3-8) because the devices don't respond to ICMP. Network admins like to disable ICMP on their switches and routers so you can't trace the network topology. Your only definite packet loss is on 9 and 11 because you only got 1 of the 3 packets returned.