does anyone think this outage will drive the price of btc up.
It damn well ought to. From a business perspective, anyone mining with one of the affected pools (regardless of their reasoning) had their cost of doing business go up severely (akin to breakage/spillage/etc. from a manufacturer's perspective). Those outages, from my vantage point, have affected operations for a quarter to half of a day. Said another way, a quarter to a half of a day's production has been lost by people using those pools. Furthermore, difficulty is such that it is statistically unfeasible for those miners to have switched their hardware over to solo mining, as you can't make up the difference in half a day assuming an average mining setup (average in my mind is 1 or 2 GH/sec). Even if you had (what I consider to be) an "above average" setup with 15 Ghash/sec or so, your average block generation time running solo is still a day or more. So yes it should drive the price up.
Although your question was not should it, but will it. The problem is miners are essentially kids. Note that I didn't say minors, I said kids. As in, someone with the mentality of a child. That's the only way to explain the kind of irrational exuberance that you see with people dumping gobs of money into mining. It looks like the kiddies will continue to sell their bitcoins at the severely undervalued price of $8.30ish. I say severely undervalued because I believe bitcoins will go to $1000 in 2 or 3 years, and the kiddies will realize they could've been millionaires by holding on to what they minted with spare video cards and free electricity in mom's basement. I can't help but think of the story of Easu, the guy who sold his birthright for a bowl of soup. But I digress..
