Magento: Admin area stall/freeze

After noting some downtime issues recently with Magentocommerce.com - it has come to our attention that it has had a possible impact on stores. When Magentocommerce went down this afternoon - the admin area on all of our hosted stores became non-responsive. As a test, we thought perhaps the version checking facility in the admin (to check for new messages/updates) might be hanging and causing an issue. We subsequently added,
127.0.0.1 <strong>magentocommerce.com www.magentocommerce.com</strong>
To the /etc/hosts file, then after, trying to access the admin was immediate without any hang/stall. This immediately resolved the issue, but is not an ideal solution, we shall be adding this issue to the bug tracker.