UNCONTACTABLE

We were without email access for most of yesterday afternoon, and as I've written before for someone who does a lot of his work by email this does cause big problems.
The reason this time was that our host in the United States was carrying out some essential maintenance. They chose to do this at their quietest time - the middle of the night - which just happens to be our busiest time of the day.
Apparently we did receive advance notice of this outage, but I suspect this went to one of my colleagues who didn't understand the true significance of the English email he or she received. There's not a lot we could have done but at least we would have known and been able to make preparations.