Unreliable Server

The servers are pretty reliable. There a numerous things that can cause connection issues, from things on the client side, ads, your local connection, your ISP's connection the rest of the internet, any of the connections you traffic goes through on the way to the chess.com Live servers, and the site's datacenter. Only as small part of that is under the influence of the site.

There are some things that can be done on your end to improve things some.

https://support.chess.com/article/213-how-do-i-fix-my-disconnect-lag-issues

I have had a few minor issues, but nothing extreme or that cost me a game. However, I don't play live and shortest move time is two days, so if there is a problem, I have plenty of time to recover. Hope things improve for you.

I do have the same experience of bad connection with loosing the game as result.
This is unfair and has nothing todo with my playing skills.

I'm a gold member but only because right now, I can't afford diamond. I know it can get annoying, but, I hope it doesn't upset you too much......there's chess Free! Hope that lightens your spirits. I thought I'd post something.....

I rarely play live so I can't speak to that, but in the last couple weeks I've had a number of times where either I cannot pull up a daily game due to a 404 error, or can't get to any page of the site for the same.  I just get the pic of Danny fixing the computer at his desk or whatever it is with the page not found error. Sometimes but not always, I have to log back in afterward.  I just figure they're doing site maintenance, but it's at strange times of the day.  I suppose there really is no good time to restart servers or whatever's going on. 

That picture is a 5xx server error and those pages don't have any session code so it looks like you're logged off, but really aren't.

That's something separate from connection issues to live, though when those occur, it will cause live connection issues.

You might check out the following, which may help minimize potential issues on the client side:

https://support.chess.com/article/213-how-do-i-fix-my-disconnect-lag-issues

As I typed that I thought it might have been a 505 error, 501... Just can't recall, but yes you're correct. 

Interestingly enough, I'd say it's most frequent for me on wired connections.  I would say I get it less often on my tablet, which I use a lot more than my PC's either at work or at home.  My one work PC does it frequently. 

5xx errors are server side and can be caused be various reasons, most not caused by client side issues. Sometimes a bad cached link may pass data that the server doesn't have error handling for, but that's likely a very low number of cases.

Gotcha.  I use Opera (now a variant of Chrome) both on Windows and Android, though they are not even close to the same browser. I would not be surprised if that has something to do with it since I see folks using other browsers with totally different problems than I have, and vise versa. 

For the number of users on the site, I think the number of problems is actually pretty scant.