Diablo III Servers Down for Emergency Maintenance

Diablo III's always-online servers went down for emergency maintenance on launch day, a pointed reminder of the cost of requiring a login to play solo.

It wouldn’t be the launch day of a major game without some kind of issue. Diablo III’s servers in the Americas went offline for urgent maintenance to address several problems hammering the game, with Blizzard estimating roughly an hour of downtime.

And there’s the rub: this is the price you pay when you have to log in to a server just to play an offline single-player campaign. Always-online for a game with a solo mode was a controversial call before launch, and day one is exactly where that decision gets tested.