how long is the authentication gonna be down for? Anyone else having this issue?
--StoneBlock 2
Authentication servers is nothing we control and therefore nothing we can answer.
Those are Mojangs servers.
If it never works for you, then you might have used a cracked launcher that puts false records in your host file on your machine, clear that out.
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
You can open that in notepad, and if there's any line that states "mojang" something, then you need to open the file as administrator/elevated and remove those lines, and then save the file.
After that it should work.