Yes, both riding rails, and throwing ender pearls make this problem much more noticeable.
I'm not reporting that the service is down. I'm reporting that it's a bug that the service is frequently down, and that the client doesn't handle the outage gracefully. (I would classify gracefully as using previously found skins)
It could also be viewed as a bug that the client doesn't cache the skins it successfully got in the past when it is unable to connect to the skin server.
Apologies. Please direct me to the bug tracking system for the skin server. I'll open the ticket there.
I understand the problem, I even mention it within the description. It doesn't mean that the frequent outage isn't a bug that needs to be fixed. It can be a mojang server-side bug causing the frequent outages. Or inadequate capacity, that would also be a defect.
If the problem occurs in the future, what is the best way to get the debug information back to Mojang?