Hi
If you are of the same type than I, you may have had troubles to connect to any of freenode channels for the past 15 hours or so. It seems some irc clients mention the problem, others do not do anything except for endlessly looking for the channel and not finding it (that was my case).
It seems to be a spambot attack on freenode. You may try the channel chat.freenode.net. It works.
Nevertheless, discussions are difficult to keep up with, due to users endlessly automatically quitting and joining. Private channels are at least working :-)
I only post this here to avoid being confused with a spammer, so please have the information circulate as needed :-)
ant