Site Instability (PM Count, Posts Disappear, 404/500 Error)

I had two unread PMs this morning, and after checking them, I've been seeing my unread PM count flipping back and forth between two and zero.

EDIT: Title changed - Actually there seems to just be a lot of general instability on the site right now. Slow page loads. Occasional 404/500 errors. I've also had a few PM and forum replies vanish into the internet ether after clicking the submit button.

@chaser324: Yep, it's generally pretty wonky. Skeleton crew on the engineering staff so it may persist into tomorrow, unfortunately.

Damn skeletons should leave the site alone, just because it's Halloween...

The site is really unresponsive for me as well. Lots of 404 errors and it says that Patrick's Worth Reading article is live!?!

And forum topics have sometimes more posts than it says on the frontpage or the forum page.

Is it the increase in visitors because of the approaching new console releases? Other videogame related websites seem to be struggling too.

@morningstar said:

I don't know that this is actually a new thing, and in fact it might actually be intentional. The front page likely gets far more hits than the forum page, and what you're seeing is probably the result of some necessary caching to reduce server load.

Probably because Sony has seen that we are getting close to the truth in the sessler thread and are getting ready to DDOS Giant Bomb

I don't think it's anything to do with increased server load; just wonky servers to begin with. Unfortunately our server ops guy is out sick, but we're doing what we can.

What I meant, was that sometimes a topic may say f.eks. 100 posts, and when you click on the topic it contains far more than 100 posts. One current example is the Sessler twitter debacle topic, it says on the forum it has 699 posts. If I click the topic however, it has far more than 800 posts.

My explanation would be better if I spoke English of course =)