This was expected and talked about as far back as last Friday, that I saw. It was also noted in the launcher yesterday that there would be maintenance this morning. I will fault PWE/Cryptic though for not giving notice on Facebook or Twitter that this maintenance was going to happen.
And you are......wrong. EverQuest 2 does just that on their procable equipment. They give a % and also list about how many times they proc per minute on average, on everything that has a chance effect.
Well, since the studio and the servers are located in the USA, I would think that maintenance schedules would be dependent upon personnel in the USA that need to perform said maintenance. It's way too costly to keep personnel on staff to do this work during off hours, and Cryptic is no way any different than any other…
Signed! I have seen 10 slots being used during a round of dailies for quest items, 10! And if for some reason the game doesnt remove quest items at turn in (happens frequently in Sharandar), more slots are used.
Actually, when the service is down for actual "maintenance", you will get redirected to a maintenance page. The small popup message is just a default when things break.