This is just speculation, of course, but do you guys think maybe someone seriously might have done something to the servers?
I mean, I can understand an unexpected crash+restart. Or even a crash+fix+restart. But I really think something went terribly wrong.

And everyone here knows that there have been plenty of trolls who seem like they would do something like this just because they didn't like the game.

Well some kind of attack may have happened, but since Cryptic seems to tie a lot of their servers together, if it were something along these lines, I think the forums would be reacting accordingly.

Nah, I think something was in their patch that they applied to the server this morning that borked some major code somewhere

We can only guess ... Let's try :

1) Cryptic guys are not there, they are exhausted after the last two months rushing the game, they just went out eat something. Quite unlikely.

2) Hardware failure or electricity problem or something like this. Unlikely.

3) Massive server crash due to the overload, related to the 149M (?) patch. To me, very likely, they still have problems when both Americans and Europeans are online. I won't be surprised if the server has troubles again tomorrow after 8pm GMT.

4) They grabbed the lifers / 1 years subscribers money and ran.