Server downtime
Each day, all EVE server clusters go offline from 11:00 to (nominally) 11:15 (UTC and EVE Server Time) for routine maintenance.
This is usually called "daily downtime", and while maintenance or unplanned failures can occur at any time, an unqualified reference to "downtime" generally refers to this daily period.
You will receive in-game notifications that downtime is about to begin.
Downtime effects
During this time:
- It is not possible to launch the game. If you are logged in, you lose your connection to the game and be logged off.
- It is possible to launch the launcher, but it may be necessary to restart the launcher after the downtime to log in successfully.
- The launcher cannot always reload new patches while active.
- If this happens, you will get an "incompatible build" error on character selection (just restart the launcher to solve this problem).
- The daily downtime was shortened from 30 minutes to 15 in May 2016.
- On most days the downtime is over after a few minutes. Only in a few cases are the whole 15 minutes needed.
- Patches for the game and EVE Online expansions are deployed in the daily downtime.
- Depending on the amount of work to be done, the downtime is sometimes extended (sometimes up to several hours)
- CCP usually gives notice of extended downtime through communications such as the EVE Online Twitter status account[Note 1], the EVE online DEV posts and a banner on the EVE launcher.
After downtime:
- Missions you have not completed have NPCs respawned.
- NPC wrecks are removed.
- All your combat timers are removed.
- If you are in an Abyssal Deadspace when the downtime happens, you are returned to where you activated the filament. Yet you will be placed in a random spot within the system from which you entered Abyss, maybe even in deepspot.
Official information about unscheduled downtime is published to Twitter.
Removing downtime
There are ongoing attempts to reduce and get rid of the downtime entirely.
The first day without downtime was December, 4th 2019 [1]. The data collected during this event went into several fixes and led to a second attempt on September, 9th 2021 [2][3]. Additionally, for the first time, the downtime was postponed on September 10th, 2021 to 15:00 UTC, keeping the server continuously online for almost 52 hours.
As part of these efforts, the daily server downtime is still disabled on Singularity as of April 2023.
