I'm on beta too. Think it's a DOS attack?
Last I "heard" Jim and John didn't know. Somebody over on the Yahoo site said their firewall was being hit by a lot of sites with an .ru extension (Russia). Don't know if that's tinfoil time or not.
I think this is more than a regular server/software issue. My guess is that it's beyond John's control or we would have at least heard about what the problem is.