AFTER MUCH GOOGLEING (because I never thought to bookmark this page) I found this below.
I didnt realise it would mean the dgrin would be down too as normally I rely on dgrin to see whats causing outages, if that's down too it leaves me no where easy to get info from
I don't know how far ahead timewise we are but my clients in the USA usually contact me from 11 am onwards, so they must be running late with this maintenance.
I think it was meant to put the sites in read only but as posted before I just get an error message that nothing at all can be accessed
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"Scheduled maintenance Tuesday 8/11 and Thursday 8/13
Don MacAskill 5:57 pm on August 10, 2009 Permalink
Over the last two months, we’ve been working on a big, important network overhaul and upgrade. We’ve been trying to do it “gently” by keeping the old network in place and upgrading around it. The intent was to minimize customer downtime and maximize network performance.
We failed.
A number of times we blew our new network configurations, resulting in catastrophic failure of the network that took the site down for far longer than should have been necessary. Last week, for example, we made a network change that should have resulted in a maximum of 30 seconds of instability, and instead resulted in hours of downtime. We know this was painful for you, your friends, families, and businesses. We know you need your priceless memories and those of your loved ones and clients online and available as much as possible.
So we’re doing what we should have done two months ago: Scheduling two major maintenance windows, taking the site completely offline, redoing the network from scratch, and bringing it online in a faster, more stable state. We apologize for the inconvenience, but as I outlined above, the old method, designed to *minimize* inconvenience, turned out to be *maximizing* it instead. Instead of yanking the Band-Aid off in one big tug, we’ve been slowly, agonizingly pulling it off – causing you, our most loyal customers, lots more pain than we should have.
We’re still prepping for these major changes, and it’s possible that we won’t be ready by tomorrow night, in which case we’ll postpone. We’ll post here if the dates or times change. What we won’t do, though, is attempt any more “gentle” changes to the network in the meantime.
There is a little silver lining in these clouds – this should pave the way for some seriously big new improvements and features, starting with one we hope to ship this week. Stay tuned.
Again, I’m very sorry for all the site issues recently and the entire company is galvanized to pull the Band-Aid off quickly and cleanly this week, so we can all get back to the stable, fast service we all fell in love with.
Don MacAskill
Founder, CEO & Chief Geek"