I’ve been having intermittent problems all day loading puzzles. Is it just me, or is there an issue with excessive traffic? Possibly an attempted DDOS attack?

Not seeing issues here, the server is using less than 5% of its total capacity.

Wrt. bots, there have been about 35000 bot requests during the past 2.5 days.

By far the most are from "bing" (15000).

Others are google (5000), apple (5000), "dataforseo" (3000), "trendiction" (3000)

(there must be tons of new small companies desperate to steal data for their AI models)

The remaining 4000 or so are from bidswitch, imagesift, yandex, mojeek, petalbot, quantcast,
clickagy, sirdata, weborama, criteo, jaunt, dotbot, opebot, etc. etc. etc...

Same issue here

Very frustrating! I'm still having problems accessing the website, with often having to log out and back in again several times before I can access my next puzzle.

I've now managed to solve all today's puzzles, apart from the 9x9 and the extra puzzle, both of which don't expire today. But I'm still trying to work my way through today's timed puzzles and experiencing the same problem getting them to load.

What the heck is going on?

In about an hour I'll get a daily performance summary, I'll compare it to the one from the day before.

I'll also check if there are any specific issues from where you are.

Thanks Patrick

It seems to be functioning normally now. But it would be nice to know if there was some specific issue that caused the problems I've had today. By way of further background, I had absolutely no problems accessing other websites today.

I am having issues too.

At first, I couldn't get to the site. Now, I can get to the site, but I can't seem to go to an unsolved puzzle.

I was actually surprised I could get to the forums.

it is working now for me. TY for what ever you did.

I wrote too soon.

It was working well for about 20 or 30 mins, and then I couldn't get any where.

I emailed Patrick as I could not even get to the site, and I can now get to the site, but I can not get to a specific puzzle.

While I sympathise with what you’ve experienced, I’m kinda relieved it’s not just me, Shortly after I announced last night that it seemed to be working fine again, it went back to exactly the pattern you have described.

So I abandoned my attempts to access the website, hoping that whatever glitch is causing the issues woukd have been resolved by today. I have been able to access the forum this morning, but the website took longer than usual to load. Fingers crossed!