[AngleWyrm]

I had a heck of a time trying to get GameDev.net last night, and it was still dragging it's heals this morning. The top graphic would pop up right away (cached probably)

25~30 seconds later, the ad banner would come up, but still no forum pages. Another 25~30 seconds goes by, and finally the page loads. Happened every time.

My guess is that there is one main advertizing agency that does banners, and they crashed. The result? web sites timing out on an ad banner.

Moral: Don't put 'pre-load' or whatever into your web pages, you might make your customers wait on someone else's problems.

That's my guess anyway.