What's happening?

I can assure you that there were plenty of articles during that time period.
However -- I have no way of knowing whether Comcast's news server was crashed during that period.
Or perhaps it crashed early during that period, was rebuilt form backups (which tends to set the article numbers back to an earlier number), and then your system thought that there were no new articles, because the article numbers were lower than the last that you had read,
Once the article numbers worked their way past that point, you would have started to receive new articles again.
During that period, for OE, I believe that the trick is to unsubscribe from the newsgroup (to cause OE to forget the numbers) and then to re-subscribe.
Enjoy, DoN.

What? You didn't know about the r.c.m Alaskan cruise trip? I'm pretty sure we sent you an invitation....
R, Tom Q.

Tom sez:
"What? You didn't know about the r.c.m Alaskan cruise trip? I'm pretty sure we sent you an invitation...."
Jeez, Tom. No. You did send it on RCM didn't you? Musta got lost along with the other stuff. Strange you should ask about a cruise, though. Actually, during that week I was on a cruise. We did the grand American Queen steamboat cruise from New Orleans to Natchez and return. I didn't meet any other RCM'ers on the cruise, though. Surely, I'd have recognized them down in the engine room with me! Spent so much time there, they began to think I was a stowaway, esp. when I volunteered to work for free. Metal working content: There was a slight knock coming from the port side engine. It was coming from one of the overhead Hackworth valve gear linkages. They said, it was going to be repaired when next in port ... I go, "Won't that require a lot of down time and loss of revenue?" "Nope, see that guy over there on the lathe ... he's making a new bushing right now"
Bob Swinney