In before someone makes fun of him for saying "que" instead of "queue"!

But seriously,

It seems to be tied to how many people are flooding the login at a particular time.

I noticed the same thing happened to me Saturday if I sat there spamming "0" trying to log in. After a while, the NA/EU servers would show themselves as unavailable.

While I agree with you, a queue timer would be brilliant; it seems like there IS one but it only works when there are a small number of people trying to connect to your server.

The last two times I was able to get into the game; I had a queue timer. There was even one incident in which it popped up, but then immediately gave me the 1017 error.

All we can do is go outside, get a tan, eat some Labour Day food that is bad for us, and hope Wednesday brings some sort of relief.