Seems to just be part of the epic fail Blizz started today with the deleting of in-game mail, followed by "extended maintenance" as they tried to fix the problem, promising info updates that never came, followed by realizing they weren't going to be able to fix this right away, indicating the realms would be coming back up, and then .... this.

I don't personally expect the system to be perfect or up 100% of the time, but man there has been some remarkably poor and misleading communication on the part of Blizzard about this sequence of events. If you haven't seen the post from Zarhym (you can see it on www.wowinsider.com), it's a masterful example of euphemism. Such as "we experienced an error" ... Sheesh.