You must have caught the site during a maintenance window. They are usually very brief and downtimes are short. It has been down on and off over the last week or so while all the back end components were updated. That is "mostly" done now and so it should be stable until next spring when it's time to apply the updates for the Spring 'Fest.
Please let me know if you see any additional issues.
Thank you and 73,
Ben Gore, KB1NZN
NEAR-Fest Webmaster