LimeWire doesn't require a centralized server to connect, but it makes things faster and more convenient.

The servers that LW connects to on startup, router.limewire.com and connectX.gnutellanet.com provide you a few initial hosts to connect to. From there, LW can find other hosts and operate completely autonomously. The problem is that router.limewire.com AND connectX.gnutellanet.com are ALL down. That's why we're encouraging people to go to connect3.bearshare.net. But if you know friends who are connected, you can just connect directly to them and everything will be ok. Or if you disable the "Use QuickConnect hosts" option, LW will try to connect to the addresses stored in your gnutella.net file.

Incidentally, our servers appear to be the victim of a "syn flood" denial of service (DoS) attack. Now why would anyone want to do that?

-Christopher Rohrs