I believe that http://tug.ctan.org is back. I would appreciate an email if someone notices a remaining problem. I will leave a small notice up on the home page for a day or two.
The major reason for the outage was a software upgrade that should improve our ability to gather and maintain metadata. In particular, there is an improved upload facility that will allow contributers to directly edit package descriptions, etc. These scripts should emerge from testing in the coming weeks.
Allow me, please, a thanks. Part of the upgrade -- the part I was scratching my head about -- involved putting a version 8 of the database PostgreSQL onto my Debian system (Sarge stable now has a version 7). While I was aware that magical things can be done with apt-get, dpkg, etc., I didn't personally know how to do them. Then I found Vadim Kutchin's article http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/373 and it was perfect. Of course, CTAN is built on the contibutions of many people so in some ways I am not surprised at his generosity in publishing the steps, but wow was I glad when that article title showed in Google!
Jim Hefferon St Michael's College