Yesterday someone mentioned in one of the channels that all of the nicks disappeared. The panel was all black. Then announced he was going to reboot to try and fix it.

I had never experienced that and know intermittent problems can be hard to figure out. Then today it happened to me for the first time. I switched from channel to channel and all I looked at had blank nick lists. I was about ready to do a restart also but then grabbed the vertical scroll button and pulled it down. As i did, nicks below appeared and when I moved it back to the top, all of the usual nicks had reappeared there too.

I don't have a clue as to what is causing the blackout, but this might be a quick and dirty workaround for now.