CCP has announced that EVE will have some downtime on Thursday August 2nd so they can perform hardware and software upgrades.

Hardware and software upgrades for EVE Online this week On Tuesday, July 31, Tranquility will experience an extended downtime period from 04:00 through 12:00 GMT. During this time, we will upgrade our database to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition Service Pack 2. At the same time, we will replace all of our database hardware.

On Thursday, August 2, we will expand our solid state storage to 256 GB by adding another RAMSAN unit. This upgrade will not require any additional downtime.

Discussion concerning this announcement may be found in this forum thread.

As with any extended downtime, we recommend training a skill with a long learning time.