Wishing once again SBS would EVER bother posting what they say on discord to the forums.. sigh. But here is the info you are after.
"Caspian ☁Yesterday at 8:00 PM Hey Elyrians. Yesterday (12/21) at 3:31pm PST shortly after the re-launch of Domain Portal with the Settlers of Elyria event, the site began to perform increasingly worse. It appears that there are thousands of incoming requests being made for sale info, domain info, etc. It's unclear yet whether these are part of an intentional denial-of-service, botting, or a bug in the Settlers of Elyria client code that is causing the issue, but the constant traffic is causing the site to run at a constant 100% utilization. Regardless of the cause, tomorrow (12/22 PST) we will begin taking steps to ensure the large volume of incoming requests are not impacting peoples' ability to use the other services provided by the site. In the interim, I've taken the Domain Portal down but the site remains unusable due to the sheer volume of incoming requests for domain name info, sale info, etc. I apologize for the inconvenience . The web team will investigate further as soon as they are able. Thanks!"
"Caspian ☁Yesterday at 9:10 PM After investigation, I've discovered the root cause of the performance problems we began suffering from earlier yesterday, after the latest release of the DSS portal. I will be leaving the DSS portal disabled for the time being while we roll out a new fix and we ask anyone that has the DSS portal open in any browser to close it. Thanks for your cooperation! Please note, website performance, aside from the DSS portal, has returned to normal. Thanks again!"