Hey everybody, I'm fairly new to BTC though I've been following it for a while. Earlier I was going to check the balance of my main wallet, and noticed blockchain.info was down for maintenance. That was a couple hours ago and it still is, but I was just wondering if that is a common occurrence, and if so how long on average it is. I guess this would be a good time to get the fractions of a coin I have backed up on a paper wallet?
To answer another of your questions: No, blockchain.info is rarely down for maintenance. Today's outage is definitely a fluke.
Full disclosure: I am working for Blockchain
But I have been using the service for the past few years, before I was part of the team. The site was almost never down.