It'll be back up before Christmas Break is over, If this is Mojang's servers running slow they're guaranteed to speed up sooner, rather than later..... Hopefully
I can't believe I was banned for internet connectivity, because if that hadn't happened I'd still be playing now....
While we await for Mojang to fix this lets enjoy the downtime by a game... visit http://empireminecraft.com/threads/game.1407/ for the game