This is FFXIV Producer and Director Yoshida.

The latest major Patch 4.2 was released today at 19:00 JST (2:00 a.m. PST / 10:00 GMT), however due to the high levels of intensity incurred on various zones, there have been issues where some functions of content servers and duty finder servers stopped functioning.

Currently the development team is investigating the cause of the issue while conducting an emergency maintenance to improve the current situation. We would like to sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused while players were eager for the release of Patch 4.2, and that we needed to conduct a maintenance at this huge scale.

Not only due to the fact that we needed to have a long maintenance ahead of the release of Patch 4.2 but also because we needed to run this emergency maintenance, we are currently discussing the possibility to extend the play time by one day to the players.

This maintenance is planned for 2 hours but we are doing our best to finish this as soon as possible. We’d like to ask for your patience for more updates with regards to this matter.
The development and operations teams are continuing to do our best to solve the issue so we are grateful for your continuing understanding and would like to sincerely apologize for the issue.

* Due to high urgency of the matter, we needed to release this news in Japanese ahead of other languages. However, the same comment will be posted in the respected languages when the translations are done.