In the past two weeks, the site has been very unstable, sometimes for one second a page would load and the next it wouldn’t load at all. The status of lemmy.world would fluctuate a lot on lemmy-status.org, and there have times where the site has been down for hours.
It’s been under attack from malicious actors, some DDoS, some database related (they overload the database with download requests). Likely because lemmy.world is one of the largest instances and they figure they can cause the most damage by attacking this one.