Sometimes you can't keep everything running on bubblegum and spit. You need to shut it down, suss out the issues and get it fixed. Would you rather the game just RANDOMLY shut down for some things and other things break randomly throughout your player experience? It's going down for a planned 8 hours now, so you dont get random bits of your playing experience broken later. I don't know if you've ever fixed a complex system like a car or a network, but some things take a bit to troubleshoot, you can't expect it done in just a couple hours.
if that's not enough reason to justify it , I don't think you'd be happy with any explanation. Criticism is always necessary, but I think this isn't a lot to ask of us.