John, your browser is/was caching the outage page, clearing your cache by pressing [CTRL-F5] should get you past the outage message more often than not.Graham, thanks for the suggestion. Yes that worked once. Didn't work another time.
I wonder why the browser (Chrome) caches the error message. Is it too much like a normal page? This is the only site that an error message gets cached. Duh! Just realized the reason. It is the only site I regularly get error messages.
OK problem fixed thank you.