It has been both broken and unbroken lately, at different times. Right after the last extended outage, it was broken at first. Then it was working again. Now it appears broken again. I'm not sure what Danny does to bring it back.
I suspect that search (or possibly an abuse of it) is what has been killing the whole site lately. It wouldn't surprise me if search has been selectively disabled to contain the problem. Now that bots and AI agents represent more than half of the traffic on the internet, humans have become the second-class users. It just works different now.
My working assumption has been that search works from an index database that gets left in an internally-inconsistent state when the system either crashes or grinds to a halt and has to be drop-kicked without an orderly shutdown. That would leave search not working until the index DB gets rebuilt, which may be one of (a) a very slow background process, (b) a process that doesn't happen unless Danny notices it's needed, or (c) both a and b. I hadn't assumed that search was the source of the problem, though I can't rule it out.
