I logged on to one of my forums and I got this:

phpBB : Critical Error

Could not connect to the database

then went into my cpanel on 2 of my sites and it said mysql databases: "0"

just gone.....

Hostgator's reply? "are you sure?"

I haven't even checked my other sites, too afraid to see the carnage

If you didn't delete those databases, and cpanel is saying there are none, then you need to get back on hostgator's butts to restore a backup.

Hostgator's reply? "are you sure?"

Was that on live chat?

Yes, that was on live chat - kind of pisses me off when they say such coy things - like I'm some sort of idiot and the mistake was mine. This is the second time this has happened so I wasn't too alarmed, I just assumed they had a server down or something - I just hate it when they have downtime and then act so surprised about it - maybe they should take a more "we're currently aware of the problem and are working diligently to fix it" approach. Makes me wonder how long my sites would be sitting there "idle" if I hadn't jumped on them for it.

I'm not sure how much info the live chat guys have regarding what the admins do, or the status of the servers. Live chat remains only the front line and can generally help only with the easier stuff.

That "are you sure?" did come off as inappropriate though.

Anyway, was MySQL down? Were the databases really gone? What happened?

no, I believe the server had to be rebooted - nothing major, as far as I can tell all is fine aside from the inconvenience

Good to hear it was nothing critical.