Absolutely, I used to work for an online bookmaker and if we saw a spike in 404s it usually meant one of our sports traders had stuffed something up and took do

Absolutely, I used to work for an online bookmaker and if we saw a spike in 404s it usually meant one of our sports traders had stuffed something up and took down a market early, or a release went out that broke our navigation. In a business that is inherently spikey (i.e. the majority of bets came through _just_ before an event started) we had to be pretty careful about what spikes were good and what were bad.