This is not necessarily true. I waited like a good player for about 20 minutes last night, then finally hit the play button just to see what would happen (armed with my "it was like that when I found it!" excuse)... and it logged me in nice and neat. It's saying the same thing this morning for Shidreth, and again I logged in just fine.
Figured I would share this in case there are other credulous people like me out there who actually believe server down messages.
With the changes they've made to server login / char creation, I'm not quite sure at what point we actually access the servers anymore, so it can be hard to tell if they're really up or down.
My apologies if this has already been noted elsewhere. I'm pre-caffeinated, I may have missed it.