My apologies if this is inconvenient, I opted to do it on shorter notice without a set hour because (a) there's not a lot of activity on the server and (b) I'm really impatient.

I'm doing a hardware upgrade that requires rebooting the network storage backend which will bring down everything for a short time. It should take well under 30 minutes to do the hardware swap and most of the downtime is just going to be the database starting back up (which often takes in the range of another 30 minutes).

As part of this I'll also be deploying some software updates that require a reboot to take effect.

I honestly haven't the foggiest idea how this happened, but apparently the DNS settings got changed a few days ago on the servers with absolutely no explanation (and to junk nonsense settings for some reason). I'm going to keep an eye on them to make sure they don't change again.

Additionally I think that created a cascade that caused the other problems.

Any posts you've made over the past 2-3 days haven't been sent to other servers, but will start sending now.

As far as the other problems, I think when that happened it caused so many processes to lag and take way longer and more resources than usual as any time it tried to contact another server it timed out on the dns request.