Tomorrow January 17th MusicBrainz will be unavailable starting at Noon PST, 15:00 EST, 20:00 UK, 21:00 CET, for at about 1 hour.
The recent problems with certain artists not being found are being caused by a failing motherboard (specific guess: failing DMA controller). Fortunately the database server is still working well and the database has not been affected by this hardware malfunction.
Tomorrow Dave Evans and myself will bring moose, our newly donated Sun Server, online and swap it out for the current database server. Once the new database server is up and running, we will want to monitor it for a while to make sure its doing its job properly. Once we’re convinced that it is doing its job, we will take the site down again and swap the drives in our then-to-be obsoleted database server with our ailing web server and bring the site back up.
After that we can remove the failing server and purchase a replacement motherboard — if you’d like to make a donation to help us cover the cost of the new motherboard (est: $800), we would greatly appreciate your support!
Thanks to Sun for the spiffy server that will get us out of a this bind and a big thanks to Dave Evans for his hard work getting our servers stable again.
I apologize for the inconvenience all this may have caused you.
MetaBrainz Blog 
Thanks to both you and Dave for your hard work in keeping MBz alive and kicking!
on the 19th I will donate at-least 20 bucks.
I have to wait because I have no money. I use the MusicBrainz database A-LOT, and I feel that if I can help, I should.
thanks for your work guys, mb is the ONE site I know that if there *is* a real problem, it *will* be fixed ASAP.