They didn't communicate that there would even be a maintenance to their users. I use Kraken every day and did not receive any sort of email and there wasn't a notice on the site that I could see. Maybe they announced on social media, but that's about it.

Starting an unannounced maintenance in the middle of the day is crazy, even if it was only for the original 2 hours. Over 24 hrs now.

I don't know if this is due to incompetence or intentional.

If they announced the site was going down for major upgrade the smart thing for users to do would be to transfer their crypto to their offline wallets. Possibly withdraw their fiat also. This is what many do for a major fork of a single coin.

Separately, there is for sure going to be tons of money lost because Kraken supports margin trading and the market took a 15% dive right around this time, I suspect there are at least a few that got a margin call and are screwed. These people would have been able to manage their positions if the service didn't have extended and unannounced downtime.