Ever since 1.8.9 came out a few friends and I can not play on servers at ALL!

On a normal day my friends and I would play Minecraft on one of my servers, or a public server... But for some reason, today (12/13/15) Minecraft was slow, wouldn't let me on servers saying, "Minecraft server; Down for maintenance" AND I couldn't see my skin... The version is 1.8.9 and I'm hoping this will be fixed by 1.9. I don't know if anyone else has this problem, but it was Woking this morning, and 2 of my friends have the SAME problem... One of them even told me that it kept chrashing...