I suspect this problem is just a traffic problem. That is, interest in the election is peaking and a lot more folks are logging onto FR. Why? It got like this on the day of Wellstone's death. The obvious explanation is that many more FREEPERS are logging on when big events happen.
I suspect that the only solution is more servers or more bandwidth for peak usage.
No. All that comes from FR is the HTML text that refers to the image on another server. The image data is transmitted directly from the other server to your computer.
However, if someone is attacking FR via a denial of service attack, they could also be attacking the servers where the images reside, along with any routers that those servers rely on...