Cannot play offline in Minecraft?

The Miecraft servers and minecraft.net were down today, and when I tried to log in (via the launcher) it gave me an error message "Cannot connect to minecraft.net" and then gave me the option to try again, or play offline. I selected "play offline" and when the loading screen came up, a window from AVG (my antivirus) came up and said something about a trojan, so I vaulted it. Now when I attempt to log in, I get teh same "cannot connect..." error message, and when I attempt to play offline, the window goes black and becomes unresponsive. Same thing when I tried to play via the browser, except the window went white. Is this a virus, or do I just have to be more patient until notch is done doing what he's doing? My friend is able to play offline, but I can't. Is there any fix to this issue?