It's not p2pool "blacking out" it's the p2pool.org node, the pool itself has had zero down time since inception.

While I do what I can to keep things up and running smoothly, I'm just one guy, and the expenses of operating p2pool.org far outweigh the financial reward, so please don't beat me up to badly

That being said, as suggested on the site, it's important to find at least 1, and preferably 2 backup p2pool nodes for your miners. One of the huge strengths of p2pool is it's resistance to downtime and DDoS through decentralization, that decentralization only works if miners mining on another persons node have back p2pool nodes configured...