No, it is not a DDOS attack from hostile entities. The bots are legitimate search crawler spiders but there have been too many all at once. Our server host company Rackspace is also looking into solutions to the problems we are having.
Thankfully access seems to be back to normal again. Hope EYB and server host company can find fix to stop reoccurrence.
I don't know if the issues are connected, but Add to EYB recipe applet not working. Get a 'something's gone wrong' message, and the 'Contact Us' returns a 404 error.