Spotted this at the Grid Status reports:

"Wednesday January 6 2010 at 5:00 a.m. Pacific, we’ll be closing logins and disabling major in world services for ninety minutes of upgrade work on our databases.
During the maintenance, logins and account registrations will be unavailable."

All, I can do is laugh with fond memories! If you are an "oldbie" then you recall how every single Wednesday the entire grid shut-down at 6 A.M. to 10 A.M. for "grid maintenance" which often included a viewer update (and sometimes lasted a lot longer!)

Yes, the entire grid was completely shut-down to public access. Only Lindens were allowed in. The SL Blog back then didn't have a 150 comment limit and it was fun to follow that entry and reading how so many people were actually going through serious withdrawals.

Ah those were the days. Of course those also were the days of complete and utter frustration when Teleports wouldn't work for three days straight, or the grey-goo attack that screwed the grid up for three days, or the bug that cause the Lindens to turn off all scripts for three days...

Of course anyone who signed-up after the "new" grid technology that allows "rolling updates" won't understand the nostalgia of the entire grid effectively shutting down and just can't appreciate it.

(Via Second Life Grid Status Reports » Blog Archive » Logins and In World Services Down for Maintenance Wednesday a.m.)