Well, I was fighting in Leeds about a minute ago, and the server suddenly dropped me instantly. I logged back in (finding it odd that I didn't have to wait for the F1 cooldown) to find that all my characters had been deleted.
So I guess you can also consider this my apologies for F1 post, so sorry to Jenga and Holt. Would have jumped back in game, but... yeah. No characters any more :/