As best I can tell you, the lockdowns and site instability started around the time of this post: https://archive.is/mXxlj A particular post got targeted, not sure if it's referenced in there, but the site started to go on and off of lockdown, until one day they just never let it back up. There were periods of time when you could browse the front page freely, but they usually went away quickly as another round of "DDOS' happened.