eleuthria,
Are any stats on pool luck available on the web interface? Are the 24 hour earning stats accurate?
There's a giant graph on the PPLNS Stats page for luck. 24 hour earnings for PPS are accurate except for the first 24 hours after a difficulty change. 24 hour earnings for PPLNS are accurate, except they're on an ~8 hour delay (uses the last 24 hours worth of closed shifts since open shifts are not done getting paid).
I'm having problems connecting too, maybe it's some DNS server or something being wacky. I also had issues connecting to the website (I got forced into a redirect via cloudfire for a good 10 seconds) Also Bitcointalk.org was down for a while for me.
I concur. Had the same issues earlier on the day too.
There was a 5 minute outage roughly last night due to a backup script on the DB server eating up all the space on the drive. Most mining software should have automatically reconnected.