Yes and yes. Yesterday I tried to connect to PAUSE several times distributed over the day. I tried it with both Firefox and Internet Explorer. After a while the browser said "The server takes too long to reply". I also used the Network Diagnosis Tool of MS. It gave rather a technical report, which sounded to me as "The server didn't accept the request". There was no error entry in the event log of Win 7.

Today I tried only once in the afternoon with both browsers. I waited several minutes before I killed them. My impression was that they were trying infinitely. Then I detected the same problem with cpantesters, which didn't exist yesterday.