We never like taking the site offline. Unfortunately we've had take the site down twice in the past two days to take care of some database encoding issues. We're sorry if either of these maintenance windows gave you trouble!
While the database that stores the project data has always supported UTF8 (eg non-latin characters), the primary database that handles things like discussions did not. That meant you'd run into errors if you used any foreign characters in your comments, and it prevented some email replies from being posted to discussions. No good!
The good news is the conversion is complete and all of Kumu is now UTF8 friendly. Yay for internationalization!