I've lost access to our site about twice a month on average since about 4 months ago. It just acts like it's gone, but without posting a "404" message. One of our fellow SOHC4 riders who lives near me and is a computer geek beyond me (I did/do mostly machine automation, he does computer systems maintenance automation) said he is very busy initializing and commissioning whole new "hard drives" online, which are the big computer centers you hear about (and maybe see here and there) that are being deployed to create gigantic computer storage space (you can think of it as being disk storage, but it's both disc and solid-state combined). Last summer a "storage facility" was completed-to-startup north of here in Wyoming, a facility with memory storage racks the size of semi-trailer trucks, thousands of them in this building. He is one of the guys who brings the new memory online, from his spare bedroom here in the Denver metro area. This sort of 'tech' is what you're hearing about in the media that is consuming vast amounts of electrical power: they are being built in areas where there isn't so much city that can get in the way of the massive infrastructure needed (cooling water, whole substations of electricity, stuff like that). When these new facilities go online (bank-by-bank) sometimes the local Internet servers get into an argument with the new storage facility's computers over which one has access to a given site: when this happens the site can go "404" (or "dark") for a while until one of them wins the fight.
Programmers tell me it isn't really a "fight", exactly, then go on to describe how it involves stealing each other's I/O, power, server attention, priorities on the Web, and some other things: sure sounds like a fight to me?
