The gears of our support robots may grind slowly but they do so with exceeding fineness; it may be a day or so before they can get to you--they're swamped at the moment because the site decided to develop problems at the preceise same time that the Holiday Sales began--but we will get you straightened out eventually.

Sounds like you got lucky. ;)

I believe that Support works on a FIFO queue with some prioritization based on how quickly they can turn the request around. I have been told it was a combination of stress, load-balancing issues, and some code that was not completely optimized that got pushed out with the last site update. What percentage of each was responsible, I could not say.

Traffic. We're still under high load.