@hesgen It is not normal for the fediverse or QOTO. In fact it is the first time we have had downtime of more than 5 minutes since our founding something like 5+ years ago.
I did make multiple posts (over 4) in the weeks leading up to it that the migration was happening when it was and that the downtime would be significant. I also made one post from the QOTO account itself.
This was a very major move to entirely new architecture (from bare metal to a scalable docker swarm like the rest of our services). This move was done to give us easier control over beta testing and updating. This is in preparation of about 6 updates we have to do in short order, all of which should be able to occur with minimal downtime due to the migration to the new infrastructure. It will also allow us to scale.
Please keep in mind while we are backup redis is reindexing so it should be slow for a short while.