windharp - 6:38 am on Oct 21, 2006 (gmt 0)

The main ODP server has a hardware failure, and needs repair. According to staff, they had to contact the manufacturer for spare parts, so the repair will take some time.

That you can access some documents, but most of the system is not reachable, is a little bit more difficult to eplain. The public servers are a cluster of machines which take the data from the main server (which is down) and cache it for some days to reduce load. So if documents are still in their cache (like some of the static documents), you will be able to access them for some time. Because www.dmoz.org is a cluster, several attempts to access a file might lead to different result.