Any more thoughts on this from the webmasters and admins? The system is still hard-down for about 90 minutes from 9am (UK time) every morning, which cannot be a good thing however important the underlying reason. That's more than 45 hours offline per month, giving an overall site uptime of around 93%.
If my own (admittedly much smaller) website had that amount of regular downtime I'd be screaming at my hosting company long before it got that bad. (Last month for example, my site had a total of 6 minutes of logged downtime, and most of that was my own fault while I was updating some php code).
Andre