Hi there,
Many users have experienced this recently, as well as indicated that it starts working again later on for them. This sounds like R18 is under heavy load, and/or is only doing minimal effort to keep their back-end services up as everyone rushes to get their titles before the deadline of Jan 31. My only recommendation at this time is to keep trying. If you think your account has been soft-banned for too much activity, the only thing you can do is wait through the `cool off` period (Usually about a day or two) and try again. Note that if you keep hammering the servers while your banned, it might reset the `cool off` period.