The observant hero, Wyntur, reveals a few secrets from last night's troubles:

At 12:25 a.m. CST, there was an in-game announcement: "All CoH game shards will be taken down for an emergency content Publish @ 12:30 a.m. CST 09/18/2004."

This announcement was made late Friday evening 09/17/2004, at a time when all eleven game servers showed two yellow dots for server load. Everyone was experiencing disconnections to the MapServer, "DBServer not available" (for log-in), "unsupported login process" or "Server not available" problems throughout the evening when all servers were taken down for a Hotfix and gradually brought back up between Midnight and 12:20 a.m. CST..

Thanks to Wyntur on the news regarding this ingame announcement!