OK right now for me and no error messages this weekend at all HERE... but that doesn't mean there isn't a bug.
From what I've been able to learn over the years of doing this, Assholes International® has made a competitive sport out of bombing whole sections of the internet to bring them down. Flooding individual servers with computer-generated requests can lock them up altogether, and MLU HAS been a victim of that before; at that point there's no choice but to shut it all down for a while until the attacks shift focus.
MLU is hosted on a huge, shared server - it's the only way to keep costs down to manageable levels. Sure, I could go to a dedicated server to escape being caught by attacks on other sites on this server, but the cost would be five to ten times what it is now - obviously a non-starter.
Even if the Lotto Faerie paid me a visit in the night and I could arrange this, there's no telling that the morons wouldn't, as they have in the past, go after individual routers in the network, or that flood attacks on other servers wouldn't lock up those routers. The latter are like merges on the highway - we might be a major artery, but sooner or later we're going to have to merge in with a larger highway to funnel traffic in or out everywhere else... otherwise we'd be an
intranet instead of being on the
internet.
I'll keep y'all posted...