There was also a big cyberattack today originating from China, possibly timed to cause disruptions in the US for cyber monday. Australian sites were also impacted. Real time tracking and visualisation here: http://map.ipviking.com/ From The Conversation:
Silver Stackers has been very slow to load today, I first suspected my internet connection but it was the same at home, work and on my mobile. Anyone else experiencing the same issue ?
Yep... Slow for me! 10-15 second delay to reload pages etc... Spewing cause it cost me an auction... 14 seconds late, and it took a good 20-30 seconds to put my bid through. I guess its karma for trying to snipe some bars!
Fine for here... server is hosted in Australia still, so there may have been some load issues on the underlying hardware or other network latency issues. It's on a virtual server so it's generally immune to hardware load issues, likely a network thing.