Here is the news. From 9/5 2AM to approximately 9/6 2AM (almost exactly 24 hours) our DNS servers experienced a DDOS attack. I'm not sure if it is related to the .INFO special or not but it was highly annoying. We are still experiencing degraded service from time to time but we are getting the situation under control. Myself and the CEO were at the data center all day yesterday trying to get the situation resolved. We have 4 DNS servers, 3 of which reside on the same network. It was these 3 that were causing the problem, the combined traffic from them was exceeding our alloted bandwidth (which is a lot). We isolated the DNS servers on a different segment of the network so the traffic to those should no longer be an issue.
This free .INFO thing has generated way more interest then we ever expected and maybe it also attracted some negative attention.
As a side not, I pray that other registrars start offering free .INFO domain names to take the load off of us. Degraded performance (or no performance) due to giving things away is not what I call a good thing.