Nobody on Earth, not even Gareth, knows or understands what happened to cause the server problems on Big.McLargeHuge yesterday, but, as usual, everybody’s blaming me. My apologies to everybody who was inconvenienced by the problems. It’s amazing how much damage can be caused by a MySQL server going down… almost all the sites on McLargeHuge are database-powered, not to mention the DNS server (the death of which caused problems accessing a certain other server I run [I’ve put in a few backup systems to help with this kind of thing in future]) and the mail server (which caused a ripple effect of delaying e-mails across the network)…
In any case; despite having no idea what caused the fault in the first place, steps are being taken to ensure that so much damage can not be caused again. Those who need to know know who to ask. Thanks to Gareth for all his help.