I have checked today none of article pages url is coming under site:sitename.com command in google. checked for all most pupular sites like ezinearticles, goarticles, articlesbase and free-articles-zone, none of the original article pages getting listed (but pages are still showing up in cached version). Also no more new article pages are getting indexed, this is happening with my new custom made site as well - all my pages are indexed apart from article pages. If it is true then It seems google has given a serious blow to backward links through articles. Similar is happening with free-press-release as well. Let me know if I am outdated or missing something?
Hopefully it's just Google doing a dance with their search engine. I think the article sites are just too powerful and have too much link juice for them to pull the plug all of a sudden. They know that doing so would create a Worldwide Internet Economy Crash! The entire internet marketing ecosystem would be in danger! lol