Whenever I hear when some service is down, I immediately go to that service to confirm. Then I repeatedly hit reload if it doesn't work to see if it can come up. I guess many people do the same and that may contribute to the problem...
Years ago I worked at a large online casual gaming company who's name ended in -ynga. Our web tier was split into two: one for serving static content required to load the HTML, Flash app, assets, etc. The other was for actual communication regarding actions taken in game.
Whenever we had any sort of issue we could generally get a good idea of what was happening by looking at changes in traffic in those two web tiers.
If people couldn't play for most reasons, game action traffic would drop to near zero, but the static asset tier traffic would usually at least triple.
So yeah, there are a lot of F5 buttons being hit out there when pages don't load.
