Our apologies, we are in the middle of migrating from one hosting provider to another, so no, not common to have this length of downtime (first time in 7 years). We're almost done.

As for your specific question, please email us: when you received the email and the name of your alert so we know who you are and what alert you are talking about. The Seat Alerts are accurate, if there is a difference it can be because too much time has passed and the seat was taken by someone else.