What has been up with lemmy.world lately?

They were getting hit with a lot of DDoS attacks a week or two ago, that may still be going on. Also they took off faster than most instances so a lot of this is just growing pains.

many people have been bailing from the server

That's not a bad thing, the content is shared between instances so you can get it on the other sites too. People going to other sites will hopefully help balance the load and possibly help with the growing pains. I haven't created an account on another instance yet, but I've been visiting other instances when .world goes down.