No, this is not an accurate statement. repository.maemo.org was down and/or broken during most of the holiday period. A user inadvertently stumbled on stage.maemo.org by misspelling repository (as seeming almost any *.maemo.org will redirect to stage.maemo.org if it doesn't already exist—in the case of garage.maemo.org, etc). stage.maemo.org is maemo's internal staging repository for testing things before they go live, and shouldn't actually be exposed to the internet at large.

Really, this isn't the sort of user experience you should expect from the product. This was a short-lived issue that happened to coincide rather unfortunately with the holiday season and its influx of new users.