At the time of your post, DALnet had had only a few servers. As far as I know, this is not due to attacks, I don't know why it is.
kernel.ga.us.dal.net, one of DALnet's largest servers, has been down most of today for maintenance. It's now up and running again. It should be a little easier to connect to mesra.* and hotspeed.* soon.
The irc.dal.net does occasionally get opened, broadway.ny.us.dal.net gets routed to it it would seem.
If you're in a country around Norway (UK, France, Germany, Holland, Sweden etc) then you might be able to connect to powertech.no.eu.dal.net. It's a pretty closed server, however, I'm from England and can connect easily, and I have some Swedish/Dutch friends that connect to it easily.
You can see a list of DALnet servers
here for future reference.
Happy chattin'
Regards,
