Anybody else get the impression that the Google Webmaster Tools are not ready for prime time? After being verified for several weeks, but seeing a real decline in crawls with error after error claiming file and sites were "unreachable" (no problem before using WMT), now most of my sites are unverified and pending verification. All the verified sites were verified using the file on server route. Those can't be reached today because Tried verifying just one domain with the meta-tag option as a test and G returns this similar error: I don't buy any of it. It is broken. Tried the webmaster groups today or recently? Lots of files (archive) not available errors. Of course the good news is after using their tools and seeing the bots stop coming they provide zero means of direct contact for help. Nothing. And I'm not counting the groups where the help can't hold a candle to the DP gang.
I was having the same issue on three different sites that kept getting into the unverified status. I ended up removing the sites from the account as I cant waste my time on problems that Google are creating.
Thanks for the post - sometimes it seems like I'm going crazy. Not long after the post above, of course, things went back to verified status... Grrrrrr. Clearly the "tools" are broken.