So it seems the best guess at the moment is that probe icing caused all the ADCs to fail leaving the pilots with degraded flight controls and little instrumentation whilst flying through an area of active CBs at night.
Then, over the days since AF447 several other AC report of probe icing and a similar cascade of failures, fortunately with better outcomes.
I doubt heightened awareness has prompted crews to report these incidents when previously they would have said nothing - such severe systems failure would have made the headlines even before AF447.
So, why the sudden flurry of similar sounding problems - a statistical blip or is there some other factor?
CC