I'll throw my hat in the mix for this issue. So frustrating. At 11am eastern time during the week. No reason why servers should be overloaded at this time.
Writing tickets is not useless. You may not get a respond, but companies usually track the amount of tickets received and usually categorize them. So if you submit a ticket under server issues, it should, in theory, at the very least put a number to the "how bad are the server issues?" question.
Anyway. This absolutely sucks. So much lost progress. That Thank You bundle was a nice start, but it better not be the end of the make good.