You may have noticed that The Register has been down for - oh - 20 hours or so. The site was also down on Monday afternoon for a couple of hours - and most of Sunday too.

The reason: we've been having problems with our Cisco LocalDirector, used for load-balancing. We suspect incipient hardware failure, but diagnostics have been complicated by the disappearance without trace of the person who originally installed the kit and who omitted to handover to us the access password.

Currently, we have a Cisco engineer at Level 3, our co-lo, trying to swap out the router. Unfortunately there has been a catalogue of farcical mishaps, including the breakdown of the engineer's laptop. We will write more about the Cisco Fiasco - later.

In the meantime The Register will be up for a few hours, we hope. At some point we will have to take the site down again to complete the swapout.

Our apologies for any inconvenience. ®