GE is picking your flesh ice :-p and you're playing into it ;-)
Anyway........ there has been talk among mod makes for a long time about simple ways to crash tribes just on connecting to them, and not even doing that much to them, as well as talk of actually getting together and doing that to a bunch of servers... but that was over a year a go. Maybe some one finally got bored enough one day at school and ran whatevr script does this thing while they were bored? :-p I knew jerks in high school that would crash servers they didn't like using our dual t1 line... of course they'd also crash porn sites, spam sites, and other smaller sites. That was of course back before the interent had any security and nobody even had heard of DSL or Cable yet. :-p ahh... the good old days?