Yeah OP is being handicapped. 99 percent of the time it is just the load of every server trying to test at once..
not exactly
my SS teacher told us we were getting DDOSed, and explained it in a way a 7th grader would understand it, and he bought up good points on how they can only last for a certain amount of time, and there's a little bit in between where there isn't a DDOS, and then it's back to the DDOS
we've had a week of state testing in March, 6th 7th and 8th grade, and this hasn't happened. there's no way in hell it could be a server overload, because it would have done the same thing earlier as well.
testing was cancelled for the second half of the day, and we had our internet back.