As the topic says: What's with all the downtimes? I'm getting them at least once a night for a few hours.

Server woes, power fluxes, pipe overloads?

I've had the same problem, about the same occurence

Backups possibly?

Backups don't cause the forums to be shut down.

Mark was doing some shuffling on the virtual machines, which required the forums to be shut down, and a day later I broke [for about 10 minutes] the web server running on one of the VMs.

Yeah, I don't know anything about "nightly" outages. It has been down a couple of times, but it far from a nightly occurance unless there's something I don't know about -- which seems unlikely since I'm the one that would have fixed it.

Well, it hasn't happened for a while. However, back when I posted this, it had happened once a night for the past few nights.