First off... don't panic! Nothing too bad/dangerous, just an explanation for why everything was slow/down for part of today (10/31.) The entire data center became the target of a massive DoS attack. Seems to have basically been a ping flood, as (when I could actually get into the server) I shut down every service, which should mean NO network traffic at all, yet the card was still getting over a megabit every second. Then I lost even my extremely slow connection. When it came back up, the server no longer responded to pings, but everything else worked fine. I think they're blocking all pings to the datacenter right now to fend off this attack.
People should be beaten with a dull spoon.