SolArisa, I hear you, but reality is still reality. A company can throw $millions at IT issues and still have outages. I am not saying it's ok for SE to stay down for extended "emergency" maintenance. It's simply real life.
If Amazon were down, they'd lose lots of revenue because they rely on people logging in and spending money right now. But that's not the SE model.
Besides, how do we know someone's head ISN'T rolling at SE?
Aether is back up, BTW.