It's no secret that Linden Lab has been having problems with the Second Life asset system. Daily problems. Last year a major outage was traced to third-party-provided systems (other people are apparently also capable of making mistakes). We're not sure if the problem system is actually hardware or software (though we think it is related to the RAID storage array), but the vendor has apparently provided a patch or update which is supposed to alleviate some of the problems.
Linden Lab will be closing logins at 11:45PM SLT (US Pacific time) tonight, and will be disconnecting all remaining users shortly after that (probably around Midnight). Applying the patches/updates and testing has been allocated 2 hours, so the Second Life grid will remain off the air until around 2AM.
What can we say? We're wishing Linden Lab luck and hoping that this will do the trick -- though, we'll just have to wait and see. We've been through this sort of thing ourselves, actually, with vendor-provided RAID hardware, and it took multiple attempts and considerable downtime and failures to make things right.
