Morning all,
We're really sorry about the issues with the site. We've been updating this thread in our Site Stuff topic.
Here's what we posted late last night -
MattTech · Yesterday 23:47
Apologies that this is happening.
We’re experiencing an issue with one of our servers which is causing downtime. Unfortunately, it’s not an easily-diagnosed issue and we’ve been making changes to mitigate it for the past week or so. Each one of those mitigations helped us to rule out another variable to try to get to the solution.
We think we’ve found the problem and are currently provisioning a brand new server to replace the one that is having issues.
@RebOrHon The 5-second delay is a mechanism to space requests to the site out to help the affected server recover. Its primary use case is to mitigate DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks. In this case, however, it was being used to allow the affected server to not become overwhelmed by our normal user traffic.
We understand how frustrating this is and we’re doing everything we can to prevent this from happening.
Thank you for bearing with us.