I hate Perl. Hate, hate, hate. Absolutely hate it. Did I mention how much I hate it? Unfortunately, Moveable Type is written in Perl, although later versions also have some PHP. Also unfortunately, this site uses MT. So, when I was recently unable to login to my site, I ran through a checklist of things that could be the matter and I eventually assumed that it had something to do with Movable Type trying to reach some URL that was down, and I assumed that URL was one of the ones affected by today's outage at (I guess) Mae West in San Jose (UPDATE: it was at a company called 365 Main, link). Despite hating Perl, I searched through the source and found what I thought was the culprit, and it appears that I was right: MT was trying to access this address: http://www.movabletype.org/news/newsbox.html which, at present, doesn't load.

Bottom line: to stop this behavior (at least on 3.14 or whatever I'm using), add the following line to mt.cfg:

NewsboxURL disable

That goes to this chunk of code:

my $newsbox_url = $app->{cfg}->NewsboxURL;
if ($newsbox_url && $newsbox_url ne 'disable') {
...