That's interesting.
Last week (I forgot which day) the Dashboard didn't come up at all to me for nearly 24 hours. No posts. No "Groups" or Contributing Members in the sidebars. I was using Opera behind a firewall here at work, but that's never stopped the Dashboard before. But Opera, nor IE, nor Chrome could pull it up. I checked again later in the day. Same lack of results. I, too, wondered, "How could anyone take a break from Mathematica?"
The next morning, I checked the Dashboard and it was still down, at least to me. I looked up the profiles of some of the regular contributors and checked their latest posts. Yes, the Community was still actively posting. I just couldn't see anything.
Another check that day suddenly gave me the Dashboard in all its Wolfram glory! And none of the current posts showed that there was ever a problem. It was seemingly only on my end.
/* shrugged shoulders */
FWIW.
--Glen