Why is qpu ascella always unreachable?

Hello, I would like to try to work with the qpu, but everyday I connect it is unreachable. On the site, it seems there was a maintenance in december, but it was supposed to last 4 days.
If anyone has worked with the qpu, is there noticeable differences than working with the simulator, at least when you run the simulators on a slow computer ?
Thank you in advance

Hello,

The maintenance in December lasted a bit more than 4 days, then we shut off the QPU completely when the company was closed for the end of the year holidays and was brought back online early January. So, I’m sure it wasn’t comfortable to work with Ascella during this period of time, and I apologize for the inconvenience.
The default parameters in the simulator sim:ascella were carefully set to reproduce the QPU results as accurately as possible (simply replace “qpu:ascella” with “sim:ascella” in your existing code, and everything should work).

Now, it’s been a few weeks the hardware is working on the QPU to upgrade it.
The result of their hard work will be released real soon, so stay tuned!

Best wishes,
Eric