My first major problem with my iPhone 5s, and it's a doozie

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is use my iPhone to find out if any e-mail from Japan has come in that needs to be answered immediately. (For those who don't know, I'm a J>E translator with about half my clients in Japan.)

So this morning, first my G-Mail and then my local ISP's mail were unobtainable. I thought at first that maybe Comcast was having one of it's all-too-frequent outages, so I tried cellular data, but that didn't work any better, and besides, wifi worked just fine with my computer. Safari worked for a while and then didn't. Then I found that none of my apps (such as the day's weather and radar) would update from yesterday. Facebook worked for a while, alone of all the apps that download data, and then it stopped working, too.

However, the phone function worked. (I called my landline.)

I thought I'd better reinstall Safari or do the long-postponed update, but when I tried plugging the phone into the computer, iTunes would not recognize it.

Has my iPhone bricked? If so, why?