Frelorn posted this update regarding the recent server outages, and today's release of the Event:

We are extending today's Downtime window until 4pm Eastern, in order to make some server side changes that we hope will resolve the recent problems we have been having with server performance.

In going over the most recent set of logs we have been gathering, some server errors were found that we feel need to be fixed and may be directly related to the server issues we have been having over the last couple of months. It was decided that we want to apply this fix as soon as possible, so rather than having another downtime tomorrow or the next day, we are going to extend today's downtime by 2 hours.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause our players who were expecting the worlds to be up sooner.

Hopefully this fixes the problem!