The stratum servers will be getting restarted in 30 minutes (12:30 PM, PST) in order to deploy a fix. bfgminer 4.1+ added TLS to Stratum as the default even though it was never a part of the protocol, and this ended up causing connections to hang for 1 minute+ when trying to connect to BTC Guild, and sometimes simply failing entirely.
The restart will only take a second to complete, but check your miners if they stop working, since historically there have always been certain miners which can't handle a disconnect properly.
EDIT/UPDATE: Restart completed, everything appears to be working as expected.
was this necessary to do, basically without notice? if the issue was with bfgminer wouldn't it be the responsibility of those that run it to revert to a previous version or change from the default - rather than bounce all miners?
Not all are aware of the issue and could possibly be lead to think btcguild was defective, and flood his inbox saying dafuq is going on.
He's just heading off the POTENTIAL problem before it happens
Although yes a little more time (24 hrs) would have been nicer