Maybe there is maintenance being done on their servers I wouldn't worry about it too much as you used to only get three or four updates a day ( some AV's only give two updates daily ), two or three hours without isn't really a problem.
A maintenance for 5 days in a row? Don't think so, man. Also... whatever this problem is, seems to be also affecting the stability of the program... ever since this problem started sometimes when I refresh Avast shields the Web Shield will delay or even refuse to start up again until I manually restart it. I've been doing tests too to determine the cause, it is ONLY the Web Shield and it also seems to happen whenever the servers are down. When I manually restart the shields when everything is normal, it never happens.
I believe this is because whenever you manually restart the shields, or particularly the web shield... the program attempts to connect to the streaming servers and fails to do so because they are down. As whenever I do restart them whenever the update service claims the "connection is not established", after this the connection becomes established again but then drops moments after.
And I'm not talking about the VPS updates btw, they still work. (Albeit when a new update comes there is no _stream folder attached to a new VPS folder) And yeah, you usually only get maybe 1-4 a day, but this is the streaming updates I'm talking about and you get a LOT more of those/day than the VPS, I've monitored Avast! for a while now and the streaming updates usually come in every 10-15 mins and constantly throughout the day, but for the past 5 days now it has been giving none at certain points of the day.
Can Avast! staff not even acknowledge this or something? Or at least tell their consumers that there is a problem? There's been no mention of it whatsoever... that's good customer service...
EDIT: Done more testing on the web shield problem I'm having and I can reproduce the problem. I try to manually update - via the Update > Virus Definitions tab > already up-to-date (connection not established) > turn off Web Shield and try to restart it > It crashes for about 3-4 seconds and then avast still states it is off > press the OFF button to ON again, this time it works.
Please don't bother trying to tell me it's a problem with my program and that I need to "repair" it, this problem WAS NOT here before this problem began. I've been able to manually restart the shields flawlessly, for the longest time now and I was not able to duplicate the problem when the servers were up.