With the efforts to recover housing lottery data and to fix the issues that caused glitches and confusion for Final Fantasy XIV players with the arrival of update 6.1, Square Enix is taking the residential areas offline for maintenance to begin fixing issues and extending the original end date for the lottery.
Because of the bugs impacting the first new housing lottery for 6.1 and with rules meant to change housing lotteries going forward, they have suspended new lotteries in the meantime. However, they extended the original end date beyond the original date of today, April 20th, and this downtime will be an emergency maintenance as a precaution to be sure the extension takes.
This will not be something that fixes the issues or gets all of the data, so be prepared for ongoing work on the housing lottery system until they do have fixes. Meanwhile, they have asked players who do have the option to finalize their purchases to do so in order to help facilitate the correct completion once they are able to recover the data. However, Square Enix does insist that the lottery went off as intended so there is no need to redo the lottery because the correct winners did win, but the system was completely botched in glitches that affected notices to players. Sometimes this happened in confusing ways, and additional bugs like refunding gil to those who had actually been selected but given the wrong information.
Anticipation ran high as the new residential area of Empyreum was such a big feature of 6.1. Additionally, the notice that the housing lottery for servers located on the recently-opened Oceania data center would happen for the first time, was also something players showed up for.
With the importance and the effect of these bugs, it makes sense that they are working quickly to address not just the issues, but to fix the system so future lotteries can not just happen but run smoothly.
See the downtime update at Final Fantasy XIV.
