I understand that SO was down for a bit earlier on. While I understand things like that do happen from time to time, is there a way to let people know that there is a problem? In the rare occurence the site is down, perhaps an update on twitter and/or facebook? This way, members know of the problem and can check twitter and or facebook for updates as to when it may come back.

In the event there is some planned maintenance or we know it's going to be down for more than a hour, we could post updates on Twitter of Facebook. Sometimes it will come back online itself after 5-10 minutes. The problem is that when it goes completely down that it's impossible to estimate when it will be back up. Usually it involves filling out a trouble ticket and having it manually rebooted. There will be more people that will be able to help bring things back online if I'm not around to restart it manually myself. The server will be down early this morning between 4-6AM while they take it offline to look at it.

Glad the board is back up, and updates on twitter do help.