The Cambridge CTAN services suffered an extended failure of their network support, from approx. 1130 BST yesterday morning (2007-06-13) to approx. 0715 BST this morning. (We have not yet had a coherent explanation of what went wrong, from our network service provider, but it is clear that the backup routing and other redundancy provisions simply didn't work.)
We therefore suffered extended outage of ftp.tex.ac.uk (aka cam.ctan.org) www.tex.ac.uk, including the UK TeX FAQ, and rsync.tex.ac.uk
My apologies to all our users. Should it turn out that something other than ordinary incompetence was the cause of the failures, interested parties will no doubt be able to read all about it, some time soon, on the risks forum (or newgroup comp.risks).
Robin Fairbairns
For the CTAN team