I think the stats are always on, just sometimes you dont see the annoying chat come up telling you that the new guy stole 25 points from you after you went on a killing spree and only got 18 points.
From Dominion, yesterday: "Stats will be down until further notice"
So yes, they were down, but stats do a lot more than compute a rank so everyone should be concerned when they go down. Chat logs? connection history? New recruit alias checking? Session data? Some or all of these components are unavailable when stats are down.
And yes, for the love, we know some people don't care where they fall in the grand ranking scheme but it is clearly a concern to Baumer and he would just like to know if stats were offline.