What are possible causes for FR to have been down today?

Free Republic is working good now. But yesterday and this morning I got a 'page not found' or something. Anyone know a specific reason for this? Also I use to have an alternate spot to go to when FR wasn't working, but I forget which it was. Maybe facebook or Yahoo groups. What is a good current one that let's us converse about possible problems? I have 'Site outages' listed that are useful but prefer alternate blogs.