Yeah, I'm partially at fault. Over the last several days I have been trying to trim out unneeded files from all over my server, and apparently some of the image files I deleted were still being used in some of my own posts. So while I tried to find as many as I could in my own archives, I asked the server admin people if they could recover the entire folder holding those images.
I'm not sure what happened, but apparently a permissions setting got changed. Hence the "403 Forbidden" error that everyone was getting when they tried to access the site. I didn't get to bed till around 4 am, and I guess the problem happened pretty soon after that. So of course I didn't catch wind of the problem till I rolled my lazy butt out of bed.
So I contacted the server people and they found the problem and corrected it.
I guess things have been running too smoothly on my server and a hiccup was due.
Anyway, sorry about that.