FreeNode has been intermittent or down for about 24 hours. This is one of the very few services we rely on that we don't either pay for or control ourselves. Although this is the first downtime I remember in 2-3 years, it might be nice to think about hosting our own IRC server or moving chat into Phabricator infrastructure once our chat stuff is more robust (this could let us build a nicer webchat, too). This is probably super duper long-term unless FreeNode has more downtime.
One thing I don't like too much about this is that it tends to give us a single point of failure, but there are a lot of other channels we could communicate over in the event of actual downtime (Facebook, email, hangouts, FreeNode IRC, etc.)
(Looks like it's back up now.)