Calm yourselves, Cub Mistress and Brain Glutton. [makes soothing patting motion] This is perfectly normal behavior for the SDMB.
Seriously. No sarcasm. This is normal.
Look:
- It’s not you.
- It’s not your computer.
- It’s not Windows.
- It’s not your ISP.
- It’s not your network.
- It’s not “traffic on the Internet”.
It’s the SDMB server. It has always been the server. It has always been like this, ever since I registered here. Days when forums, and threads, will simply hang, for long minutes at a time, to be followed by, you guessed it, “Cannot Find Server”. And yes, we’ve seen the “There seems to have been a slight problem with the database” message before. Many times.
We all just put up with it.
There are over 40,000 people registered here now; this is one of the biggest message boards on the Internet. The server has never been up to the challenge of keeping up with this particular group of fast-talking 120 wpm touch-typing smartasses, and unless Rupert Murdoch buys out the Chicago Reader and throws about $10,000 at JDavis the Tech God for a radical server upgrade, it never will keep up.
It’s as simple as that.
So chill. It’s not you. 
It’s the server.
And yes, we have had many, many discussions of this, and many, many discussions of “can we give the Reader some money to BUY a friggin’ bigger server” (the answer is always “no”), and sometime when things are running halfway up to speed you can do a Search and read all those many, many discussions for yourself. (They go all the way back to March 2000, so bring a book to read while you wait for threads to load.)
And P.S. The Straight Dope Home Page and the forums are on different servers, which explains why you can still get the Home Page when the forums are down.
And P.P.S. I believe that the “e-mail to tech staff link” function has long since been disabled by JDavis the Tech God. He reported, IIRC, that certain obnoxious parties, back in the day, were gleefully–deliberately–sending him gazillions of “tech notification” e-mails by repeatedly attempting to reload the page gazillions of times. So AFAIK no e-mail is ever actually sent anymore. However, not to worry that the tech staff doesn’t know when the boards are down. All the SDMB mods and admins are equally addicted, so when the forums are down, they holler, too.
And P.P.P.S. To save yourself a few gray hairs, always Copy and Paste any kind of carefully composed, lengthy post into WordPad or NotePad before you hit Submit. That way, when the “Cannot Find Server” page comes up, you won’t have to go outside and shoot yourself because your carefully composed post suddenly vanished into the ether.