GMS Server Status Discussion 2012-01

Particularly since we're not even clear whether the servers were actually physically crashing, whether the daemons were crashing, or whether they were simply losing connectivity at some part of the process.

Is there any "physical" connection between the servers across multiple games, or are they each hosted independently?
Seeing as most (all?) of Nexon's games had issues this week, I'd assume the root cause is somewhere before the actual channel servers of each game.
I guess this could always be a software issue, too, running some bad code every hour that trips whatever's going on. But it's still so weird this has affected all games.