Yes, I've been affected by this intermittently. Today I realized that checking my account on steemd.com was eating up some of my precious bandwidth each time I reloaded, or went to steemd.com/@myusername. It seems during times of high usage, my bandwidth limit drops from megabytes, to kilobytes. I imagine the same goes for all users, unless the user has a healthy amount of steem power. Thanks for writing this article @looksfarwoman it has confirmed what others have told me.