Regarding 1, the attack has been going on for weeks, and now the attacker shifted to using mostly ToR exit nodes on the clearnet, so some users reported that it is not always that they can access the website when using exit nodes, sometimes they get blocked because of the rate limiting that is in place to fight off the DDoS. But we can see the attack on localhost as well (actually spamming on localhost), which indicates the attacker is also using onion connections to attack us. This is a fact. Some people from the community suggested we implemented some solutions on onion, and we are going to look into it this week.

Regarding 2, that's exactly what is happening, as other services are also being affected see https://status.torproject.org/; As we said, we are a small team and we are working into solving all issues this week. We've been providing the community with good services for quite a while, and we hope to normalize the situation once we improve our defenses.

Network Performance Issues v3 Onion Services "We’ve been experiencing an unusually high load on the Tor network during the last couple of weeks, which impacts the performance of onion services and non-onion services traffic. We are currently investigating potential mitigations."