I have noticed occasional, brief outages with this forum as well, but I haven't kept track of when. For better or worse, my experience has sort of caused me to treat it as normal and expected on big forums. 
To the best of my memory, most of the outages have seemed to be during late night/early morning hours in the U.S. Central time zone, but this isn't a terribly large sample size.
Further to this, I have been able to pin one of the downtimes to being at 11:10 PM Eastern time (just happened to me now) for exactly one minute. It never times out, but stays "connecting" for a minute and then suddenly loads the page. Has happened consistently for several days.To the best of my memory, most of the outages have seemed to be during late night/early morning hours in the U.S. Central time zone, but this isn't a terribly large sample size.
Similar 1-minute downtimes seem to happen once in a while at other times too, but I haven't noticed specific times yet.
If it is a backup script kicking off, there should probably be a throttle on it, whether it is causing the db to run out of connections, or just the bandwidth to be used up I don't know.
