What happened to "Stay logged"?

I’m used to being known when I show up…this having to log in stuff is very disconcerting. Is it just me? Are cookies dead?

Logout seems to happen every time “there is a slight problem with the database.” Perhaps the software logs everyone out before fixing things?

I get logged out every time there’s a database problem. I don’t know what the software does, but I’ll certainly mention it to the tech guys. I find it very annoying.

I’ve gotten logged out without seeing a database error message. I was doing a search on somebody’s posts last night and I’d get logged out between reading a post and going back to the search results page. Very annoying. I hope the tech gods are able to fix this soon.

At least once, I’ve seen the database error page, without subsequently getting logged out. I was going to comment on it at the time, but very shortly after that, there was another database error, which did log me out.

There’s probably more than one kind of database error kicking up trouble. It’d be helpful if the message page posted some sort of error code.
As Geobabe pointed out, the logouts may not all be coming from a database error, but on the other hand, users may not even see a db error if it repairs itself quickly enough. They may just suddenly find themselves logged out.