Hey! I'm not a Panic employee, but I checked out of curiosity. I see one request going out to https://panic.com/updates/soapbox.php. This is most likely related to the one that was failing for you when play.date was down. I think it's used to check if there is a new version of the SDK.
You can see that by passing an old version number (for example: https://panic.com/updates/soapbox.php?app=Playdate%20Simulator&appver=2.4.0) the response contains info and links to update the SDK.