DayPop is Back!

My news aggregator suddenly started reporting results from DayPop again today. It's been patiently asking for DayPop's RSS feed for the last few weeks as DNS lookup failed over and over again. But today it was welcomed by the bitstream of fresh RSS goodness. A short message on DayPop's homepage says simply: "Daypop is up and running again. Sorry for the inconvenience."

I wonder why DayPop went down. In my imagination, I think it would've been really cool if they simply went down to study what the Blogsphere is like without DayPop constantly reporting the top links. There must be a feedback loop. For example, I try not to make my weblog a constant copy of the DayPop Top 40, but I've found a few stories of interest there. What was the difference when that feedback loop didn't exist?