Unfortunately Minecraft.net is down, nothing yet has been released to say why the site is down. Servers cannot operate when Minecraft.net is completely shut down, hopefully the site will come back up soon.
In other news related to 1.8
I managed to set up a 1.8 server with Tyja and Waterworth (Vanilla) Everything seem to run fine there were no clear problems that the server was facing.
Maybe, just maybe... Multi-Player is improving!