Ashlanne has posted this over on Station.com:

Beginning at 12am PST on Tuesday, January 11th, ALL SOE games, subscription and commerce services will be unavailable for maintenance. We expect this maintenance to take approximately ten hours.

This might cause some forum accounts to temporarily lose permissions, due to the inability to verify account status while the maintenance is taking place. This is only temporary and normal permissions will return automatically once the maintenance is complete.

We apologize for this interruption and will resume the affected services as soon as the maintenance is completed.

I suspect this has something to do with DC Universe Online which launches worldwide on 1-11-11 but that’s just a guess on my part.

Update:  News of this downtime has now been posted on Everquest2.com with conflicting estimates of how long things will be down:

EQ2 Servers are back up after an extended update.

EQ2 Live Servers are offline for an extended window for today’s hotfix. an unscheduled downtime. More as we have it.

• Antonia Bayle(is currently locked)
• Butcherblock(is currently locked)
• Everfrost(is currently locked)
• Freeport(is currently locked)
• Guk(is currently locked)
• Lucan DLere(is currently locked)
• Nagafen(is currently locked)
• Splitpaw(is currently locked)
• Storms(is currently locked)
• The Bazaar(is currently locked)
• Unrest(is currently locked)
• Valor(is currently locked)
• Vox(is currently locked)

Players on Butcherblock, Crushbone, Everfrost, Unrest, and Guk just received the following message:

Greetings Norrath! The server will be coming down for a brief update at 02:30 PM PST [22:30 GMT] Wednesday December 22, 2010. Please find a safe place to log out before the server comes down.

We’ll let you know when we find out the cause of this unexpected downtime.

UPDATE: This update is apparently to address an issue with illusion forms and will require the servers to be offline for approximately 1 hour. Amnerys has posted an announcement.

From the EQ2 Forums:

On Monday, November 8, 2010, the following servers will be coming down at 6:00 AM PST for network maintenance: Befallen, Permafrost, Crushbone, Runnyeye, Mistmoore, Oasis and Innovation. The downtime will also affect Battlegrounds servers. The servers are expected to be down for about 1 and 1/2 hours. We apologize for any inconvenience and will have the servers back online as quickly as possible.

Now that both Europe and the US are on off Daylight Savings, that puts the downtime from 14:00-15:30 GMT or 15:00-16:30 for mainland Europe.

Although there has been no post to EQ2Players.com or the EQ2 Forums, it seems that all SOE login servers are down for up to 9 hours of maintenance, as well as several hours of downtime for the EQ2 game servers. Here is a post from the SWG Forums from their Community team:

On Monday August 9th, we will be conducting maintenance across several different systems. The work will affect customer login and authentication, and we will be bringing down the galaxies while work is ongoing. Once the intrusive part of the maintenance is complete, we will bring up the galaxies and make them available to players.

The maintenance window is scheduled from 12:30AM through 8:30AM PDT. If additional time is needed to complete the work, we’ll update this thread accordingly.

We appreciate your patience and understanding during this process, and apologize for the disruption.

and from the Vanguard forums:

We have some maintenance to do on the servers on Monday and this will unfortunately mean you won’t be able to get to the login servers during the hours of 12am to 7:30am Pacific time on Monday 9th August.

If you’re already inside the game during these times you will be fine to continue playing, but should you log out you won’t be able to get back in.

There’s a rampant discussion on the EQ2 Forums on this subject.

We’ve got reports that the following EQ2 servers are presently down:

• Befallen
• Crushbone
• Innovation
• Mistmoore
• Oasis
• Permafrost
• Runnyeye

EQ2Players Network Status Page

Tomorrow morning (Tuesday, February 23rd) brings a Hotfix:

We’re going to be bringing down the servers in the morning for brief hotfix.

Also there are 2 Server Downtimes to report from the EQ2 Forums.

Beginning at 6:00 AM PST on Tuesday, February 23, 2010, the Antonia Bayle, Bazaar and Sebilis servers will be offline for maintenance. We expect the downtime to last around 2 hours. (from the forum post)

Beginning at 6:00 AM PST on Thursday, February 25, 2010, the Butcherblock, Lucan D’Lere and Nagafen servers will be offline for maintenance. We expect the downtime to last around 2 hours. (according to the thread title)

From the EQ2 Forums:

Crushbone, Befallen, and Permafrost will be brought down Friday morning for some upgrades to address the lag issues.

The estimated downtime is four hours.

We’ll be bringing down the servers at 6am PST and will update this thread with details as needed.

Rothgar has been communicating what steps the server team have been taking with regards to this issue. You may be interested in some of those details he’s posted, after the jump.