Bill from E-Commerce here. I don't know if this group is interested in these details, but I thought I'd let you know that the outage we had was due to a communications line failure that caused messages to back up and take the site down. Unfortunatley, it took some time for the telco vendor to resolve the problem. We've modified the site so that if such a communications line failure occurs again, it won't make the site unstable but will instead just make the transactions requiring the services using that communications line unavailable. Sorry for the inconvenience.