Apparently ALL new articles from today refuses to be downloaded. What can be causing this?

The site was knocked off the internet a couple of days ago, because the download script was getting repeatedly run over and over again, many times a second.
Several things could have caused this, firstly a malicious attempt to block the site. Which isn't out of the realms of possibility as in recent weeks a hacker has been attempting to upload scripts to the server via BeyondD6, and it's been a bit of a running battle as we were building defences against his attacks.
Secondly it could be someone running a site downloader and just attempting to download the entire site, with seven and a half thousand pages, this would hit the server pretty darn hard.
Thirdly it could be totally innocent as a search engine attempts to index the site by accessing all the pages including the downloads.
Whatever it was though, it was stopping the site from loading for everyone else, and slowing it down to an absolute crawl whenever it was working.
So I made the decision to block the operation of the Download script temporarily. I'll re-enable it in a couple of days and test whether the same problem persists, possibly moving over to blocking the offender by IP, or some other solution, or by finally looking at the download code to fix it's bugs and build in a solution to this.

Sorry for the inconvenience, all of this happened at 1am in the morning, so a hastily made solution was all I had brain power remaining to do at that time.
Freddy

I see. Oddly enough, the downloads worked fine for me Tuesday evening. Oh well, lets hope it gets resolved. I really enjoy your site & it's articles.
Greetings, GMOverkill.