Was there a glitch in the matrix?

Something like that.

The domain is registered under an email address that I don't check very often these days, so I didn't notice that the domain was about to expire until it was literally about to expire.

I tried to renew the domain but (unbenknownst to me at the time) my bank had flagged my credit card as stolen. It was true, somebody had managed to snag my credit card number and was trying to buy all sorts of interesting and unsavory things online, but they were different from the interesting and unsavory things that I usually buy online, so the bank rejected the charges as suspicious and froze the account.

Turns out if you try to purchase a domain with a stolen credit card, the registrar may put a temporary hold on your domain account preventing you from doing any credit card transactions. So I had to wait for the hold to clear before I could renew the domain with a credit card that was still functional. In the meantime, site visitors got to see a hideously designed and woefully unhelpful search page put up by the domain registrar. Yippee.

When the site experiences a major outage, I'll address it on Twitter and/or DeviantArt. They're my fallback communication channels in situations like this.