Having publicly known alternative contacts or social media accounts for instance admins really helps here. For instance startrek.website (and beehaw I think) have mastodon accounts.

Hmmm ... just checked the server now and it's still down.

So this would be approaching 24hr downtime no? Unless all the admins (how many do they have?) are away that would imply something relatively serious.

I hate that they've vanished like this, it just means that we'll end up with a few massive all-purpose instances instead of the ideal topic-based instances that the Fediverse wants.