That message usually only shows up from Amazon instances; someone must have been *really* bad.

I can really only answer number one I'm afraid, based on similar answers I've seen on meta.so over the years:

1. Generally, yeah. Someone was probably a guest at the hotel, or they had a conference or something, and someone posted a bunch of spam, or hit the rate limiter once too often. The API is read only and very light, so it has much less of an impact on the infrastructure (plus my guess is that the API has its own dedicated servers). The good news is, you can still access the site content via great apps such as [Six to Eight][1], [StackStrace][2], or my personal favourite, [Column 80][3].

On a similar note, my two top requests are:

1. SSL
2. IPv6

I know that these are both difficult and can be expensive tasks for a site of this size. Especially as SSL still requires one IP per site (yes yes, TLS, but backwards compatibility is the *goal* for these guys).

  [1]: https://stackapps.com/questions/623/six-to-eight-an-iphone-client-now-in-the-app-store
  [2]: https://stackapps.com/questions/3099/stacktrace-for-ipad
  [3]: http://www.column80.com/