Can we please get an explanation of what happened yesterday afternoon? 

The unplanned maintenance happened at a very bad time, in the midst of shipping, and being Monday there were over twice as many orders as any other weekday. 

As you should be aware, there are shipping metrics to be maintained at various marketplaces, and there are potentially significant adverse consequences for sellers who fail to fulfill there shipping time commitment. Most important of all, we failed our buyers by not living up to our delivery time commitment.

Since the site was working normally before this downtime, why couldn't this action be delayed until after normal business hours?

Bill