Of course, even better is not to make the change that causes the problem in the first place. Sometime on Sunday or Monday, something was changed and the server went from "normal" mode to "ignore most requests and respond very sluggishly to the rest" mode. Whatever that change was, whoever did it violated the cardinal rule of IT: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". The only exception is security patches, and even then, if installing a patch breaks something you roll back the changes to a known working configuration again.

Of course, the number of times I've repeated this is enormous and nothing has actually changed; my suspicion is that they don't bother to read most of the comments that get posted and never even become aware of ones like this. Perhaps a separate comment area for site feedback is in order? But they probably won't read that suggestion either.

Certainly, they are not very communicative about these issues. For example the default format for comments changes spastically between auto format and HTML, toggling every few weeks, without explanation, though people have asked for one. Auto format is preferable but picking one and sticking to it is far preferable to constantly fiddling with it. But comments to this effect go unheeded, and questions asking why it was changed for the umpteenth time are systematically ignored.