So, whats happening is LQ having network connection issues or hardware issues? Been seeing this a bit lately and randomly today, I hope everything is ok...

Overload.
Happens from time to time, just press F5 until you're back.
Consider the millions of registered users, guests and crawlers accessing LQ all the time, globally!

I've had a few of those recently. It's nice to have an explanation.

I hadn't met F5 before but I just DDG'd it. Is it the same as clicking on the refresh icon?

I, too, received a few of those lately.....

Just retry, usually you'll get back in within a couple of minutes.

It's what happens on popular forums & websites.

Perhaps, but given that LQ utilizes cloudflare I would think it would take care of this.

I'd think that F5 is equal to refresh.

In my experience, F5 == Refresh in most, if not all, applications in both Linux and Windows.

And that's exactly what you're seeing.
...
I guess cloudflare does not take care of the LQ server itself, just of ... yeah, well, what actually?

I know that cloudflare is supposed to mitigate a site from being overloaded the very least, or essentially offer DDoS protection. I am just wondering if LQ might be having hardware issues or something.

Caching gets complicated when you have user-specific content. (Such as the the "Welcome, username" box in the top right.)

With static logged-out pages everyone sees the same thing so the whole page/request can be cached in one go, no problems.

But if the page is dynamic and/or includes user-specific information, it still needs to hit the backend servers to resolve that. Depending on the caching engine and webapp setup, it can be possible to "punch holes" in otherwise cached pages - performing lighter requests for just the parts that are dynamic (and potentially caching those lighter requests separately, with different cache timeouts) - then combining all the parts together to produce the final page.

I've no idea whether LQ/CloudFlare does indeed do that sort of thing, but it could contribute to why the error might appear randomly on some requests and not on others, due to only having partial caches and an offline/busy backend server.

I've been noticing this on a few other sites that use cloudflare today/recently, I wonder if the issue isn't at cloudflare (or their ISP), not LQ specifically. Welcome to the cloud...