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:

Xalmat from Crushbone has deduced:

On Sunday, August 22, 2010, at 4:30am Pacific, one of the authentication servers for the login server seemed to crash.

Anyone that’s experiencing massive lag, or is unable to log in, this is the reason why.

Who would be logged into EQ2 at such an ungodly hour? Well it’s mid-afternoon for me, so I am such a person. 😉

Amnerys made it official:

Around 4:30 AM (PDT) this morning, some EQII servers experienced outage and connection issues. The problems were resolved within an hour, and the team at SOE is looking deeper into the issue.

We apologize for the inconvenience. All servers appear to be running fine now.