We are currently seeing some rather major issues with escher that indicate an impending hardware failure. At this time we are attempting, on an emergency basis, to relocate sites from this server to others within the network. If for some reason this is not possible, given the significant errors we are seeing, we will restore sites from the backups that ran last night. Those backups appear to be intact, and we will attempt to keep the original escher online as long as possible in order to grab any further files that we can from it before it is completely inaccessible.
If you have any questions, please contact support via the usual means.
Edit, 4:45 PM Eastern: All escher-based accounts have been restored to other servers in the network from the backup set. We are attempting to get finals from the original server, to have on hand in the event they are required for any reason.