You can unpause after like 20-30 sec, otherwise it’s indefinite unless unpaused. Your teammates can unpause instantly if you paused, but the enemies gotta wait. Every player can pause once every like 5-10 min, not sure.
The 5 min I mentioned was your window for reconnection before the punishment kicks in. Which also stops while paused.
Unfortunately all disconnections and game crashes counts as leaving the match and will be penalized appropriately. This is intended by design by Blizzard. The game server has no way to discern a legitimate disconnection or game crash from one that is forcefully caused by a dishonest player to bypass leaver penalties. You can learn about this policy here:
Everyone always says this but can’t even prove it. I’m shocked how few people don’t even know how the Internet and routing works.
Again, it might not have been on your end but also not on Blizzard’s end. Your Internet traffic goes though several hops (servers) before it even gets to Blizzard’s game server. Any one of those could have had a problem and broke the connection.
Won’t happen
Will most likely be put on ignore or blocked so good luck with that.
Or they are removing post that lead to false information. Some people will read these post and really think Blizzard servers are nothing more than a desktop PC running inside some dusty storage closet.
I would bet that 99% of the time it’s not Blizzard’s servers disconnecting people. It’s most likely something in-between that Blizzard has no control over.
As others mentioned, unless everybody got kicked, it’s likely some failure with an ISP or an internet exchange point somewhere. There’s a reason companies pay through the nose for connections with an uptime guarantee, and even then things can go wrong without any specific party to blame.
People need to accept that these systems will never be perfect, and that Blizzard can only do so much without further compromising the integrity of the SR system.
Sometimes you lose SR and it’s nobody’s fault. It sucks, but the best thing to do is shrug it off, take a break if needed, and just continue playing the game for its intended purpose: having fun (yes, even in competitive).