From Arnie, a true expert upon matters technical, at a board that must remain nameless for reasons of porotocol:

Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet, not Bill Gates.

There are all sorts of reasons why a particular site is temporarily slow, but the most common is that one (sometimes more) server on your route to the site is having problems. Your message to the site's server goes through a number of 'hops' to reach it and return, and if there are any problems on the way the site will be slow. Somebody else using a different ISP will take a different route and not have any problems. Usually the operators of the malfunctioning router will quickly discover the problem and it'll be taken out of service or fixed fairly quickly, but sometimes the problem can go on for several hours or even days.

dalehileman