From what I saw in the forums et. al. the upcoming outage is for server migration, and only happening to select realms. The outage I was talking about earlier was completely unscheduled, and stopped people not only logging into WoW in general (as in failing at authentication, not just stopping people from getting into one realm or another), but completely crashed the homepage and forum navigation pages as well.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for outages when they are doing something productive like moving some realms to new hardware and so on. That’s great. But it’s getting a little trying to come home or wake up, trying to log on and finding “Sorry, you can’t connect right now”, and to find that Blizz’s only response is “Uh, yeah. Our bad. It might be up later. Maybe. Try again tomorrow!”
Some people on the forums are talking lawsuits. That, I think, is stupid. But it would be nice if Blizz would cop up from time to time and say “Hey, we know the game’s been down for nearly a week, here have a day or two on the house”.