Intermittent performance issues

[denise]

Some people have noticed intermittent performance issues and errors on and off today: this is happening because of bursts of traffic (much of it automated or illegitimate) that can temporarily overwhelm our automatic performance scaling system when it can't keep up with adding extra resources quickly enough or when it reaches the limit of additional servers it's allowed to add. (That limit exists so a flood of garbage traffic can't make the autoscaling system spend too much money trying to accomodate the garbage.) The garbage doesn't appear to be a specific targeted DDoS attempt, just part of the general overall increase in garbage traffic internet-wide. We're doing what we can to filter it, and when performance issues happen, the site will generally recover within 5-10 minutes as our defenses kick in. I apologize for the hassle!