Quote Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth View Post
It'll go back to normal times. They always start earlier when they do infrastructure maintenance. Its happened many times in the past. It gives them longer during their workday to fix actual server issues if anything happens, as well as perform actual server upgrades/maintenance unrelated to the game servers software.
I'll have to check when the Lodestone is available again, but I believe this has been around the normal time for a while now. It doesn't seem to be just infrastructure, but the new regular time. It's been creeping back gradually, but steadily.

I don't know why they don't stagger it, since this is a globally-serviced game. It may mean that work is done in off hours, but as a software engineer and a systems admin I can attest that sometimes that's just part of the job when you service globally.