It's actually a notch caused problem and the fix is the problem.
The minecraft servers have been getting over loaded from so many people playing, because each time someone logs in, loads someone elses skin by walking to them, goes on a website that pulls skins off the site, or uses the site it uses their servers which can no longer handle the amount of connections so they are moving to a new one which will take a few days I guess, since its been since like sunday.
That's why minecraft.net keeps going up and down repeatedly, as they switch everything over.