Internet Spaceships Stalled

Some serious EVE downtime. The website isn't returning an error as before, it's like there isn't even a DNS entry for www.eveonline.com. This made me suspect something on my end so I did the usual relase/renew/flush—to no avail. Figured it was time to find external verification. EVE-Offline has a very clean interface with user count graphs of different intervals going back a year.

Looks like the website is coming back up. I'd only learned that the server is reset daily a few days ago, and their explanation makes sense:

The EVE server Tranquility, being one single cluster, is in high demand and operating at peak performance nearly all the time. In order for the server to operate smoothly and for maintenance tasks such as cleaning up space, building statistical data for the market and API, etc not to affect gameplay, Tranquility requires regular downtime for maintenance and improvements.

As a result, there is an official daily downtime from 11:00 to 11:30 GMT/UTC (EVE Time) every day.

Training continues during downtime. Agent missions do as well, so before accepting one close to downtime make sure time constraints on the mission will not result in your failing the mission before the end of downtime.

Please note that agent mission complexes marked as completed, wrecks, containers and other perishables in space despawn and disappear from space during downtime. Despawned mission complexes do not respawn after the downtime is over. Make sure you have claimed all necessary items for your agent mission before downtime hits.

Extended downtimes are used in order to fix persistent or unforeseen problems with Tranquility, fix other software or hardware issues that may have presented themselves after previous downtime or to deploy patches/upgrades for the server. Extended downtimes may also be required for additional hardware installation, such as the addition of RAMSAN units.