I'm not saying hackers but there are several of us that can tell you for a fact, the instant ConEd blew up and all of Lower Manhatten went down last night, every function on FR started working perfectly. That lasted the rest of the night.
FR is operating perfectly right now!
This is typical behavior for a load-related problem. Everything works fine until you hit the tipping point, and then the system starts thrashing so badly that everyone gets poor service. And as soon as load drops below the threshold, everything goes back to normal.
The problem is most likely being aggravated by a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack -- by FReepers. No, I don't mean we are doing it intentionally: when an error occurs, FReepers have learned to just hit reload again, or repost again -- because that "usually" works. If every person does that 2 or 3 times, it doubles or triples the load on the servers. Until enough people get frustrated and go elsewhere for news, go watch TV, or lose power and can't use their computer at all, the problem persists. Then, everything goes back to normal.