(Not 100% sure it goes here) This morning and every time I checked until now the site gave me a 502 Bad Gateway error. Is It Down said the site was down too.
I think I know, if this is what happened to PC Part Picker. http://status.linode.com/incidents/0hv086dx5jbf
There are lots of things that can cause that error - it's basically just nginx saying it can't hand off the request to whatever is supposed to be processing it - in this case presumably a PHP daemon.
It's possible, but I know from personal experience that nginx can fall over without any provocation at all. In particular, the very common nginx + PHP-FPM setup gives you excellent performance for the hardware it's running on, but it's also sensitive to even quite minor bugs in the code you run under it.