It appears that John McCormac via gtld-tech <jmcc@hosterstats.com> said:
Is anyone else seeing an increasing number of timeouts waiting for responses, timesouts waiting for authentication, 503s on the CZDS while downloading? It has been happening for a while now with some days having no issues but others, such as today, having a lot.
Lots. Yesterday while doing downloads from a virtual server at AWS, 80 of them failed with 502 errors when doing the HEAD to see if they changed and .com was truncated. Five of them failed again when it retried, they all finally worked on the third try. I'm also seeing frequent 503 and even 404 errors in the scripts that check for renewals. ICANN knows about this but they have been unable to figure out what's wrong or to fix it. R's, John