An emergency meeting of high-ranking CONCORD officials was held in closed session earlier today, as confirmed by an anonymous source of impeccable reliability. The impromptu meeting was called following a tidal wave of reports from law enforcement agencies representing each of the five empires and some small, independent territories.

CONCORD has issued a travel warning to all those going through the Obe system, a popular hub and trade route. Apparently a loosely held group of terrorists and marauders have been preying on innocent traders. Without mercy, these evildoers prefer erasing all traces of their crimes by actually killing their victims.

The SCC announced today the peaceful resolution of the strike that pervaded the educational sector yesterday, blocking all trading with skill packs. Details of the agreement were not made public but the Dean of the University of Caille, Carbircelle Hatiniestan was quoted as saying that "some significant synergistic rapprochements had been made leading to a lucrative arrangement for all parties involved".

Following profound disagreements between academics and the manufacturers of skill packs regarding their license fee, unions throughout have, in an unique demonstration of cooperation, blocked the availability of skill packs in all market regions. The SCC (Secure Commerce Commission) is expected to agree upon an emergency legislation in an extraordinary meeting tomorrow to re-establish order.

The SCC has become increasingly agitated with the influx of deceitful merchants dealing in wares which do not meet up to the expected standards. In addition the blatant bundling of various lousy salesmen, who sold ships to other people yet forgot to strip them of the extra equipment, further enlightened the SCC of how bad the situation had become.

The empires are becoming concerned that independent individuals are harvesting too much of the stellar resources the empires had staked for their own use. Couple this with the intensified pirate activity due to increases in space traffic and the empires have a real problem on their hands. They have now joined forces in a program that will augment their authority throughout civilized space in the near future.

Because of changes to security status an amnesty is granted to all, concord and the NPC factions will loose memory of their enemies

Today's downtime will be extended to 11:00-14:00 GMT, this is because of upgrades and a new patch. Patch Notes

At about 09:30 GMT we experienced some troubles with a couple of nodes in the cluster going into overdrive having negative impact on other nodes in the cluster. The cluster was immediately restarted. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Please join us Thursday, May 29, at 22:00 GMT/ 6 pm EST for our fourth Stratics House of Commons chat. The event takes place in #eveonlinehoc on the Stratics IRC server. For more information, visit http://chat.stratics.com.

A proxy server had a hardware failure, causing temporary problems in connecting to the cluster. This should be ok by now.

The problem with the second agent often being in some distant low-security solar system is now fixed. To allow everybody a chance at a new agent, we have reopened the tutorial kill mission again for all who have completed it. To acquire a new agent, go to your starting agent and complete the tutorial kill mission again.

We are currently capping the servers to maximum number of users to make sure the patch is working properly, and plan to raise the cap gradually if things look better.

Today we are updating the server with a new version. When the new patch was deployed a bug surfaced which over loaded our database servers. This bug had not been identified before in testing, as it didn't cause an overload until thousands of players were in game, along with a large increase in open orders on the regional markets. The servers have been restarted with a cap so we could observe what was going on and analyze the problem.

We have now finished updating the servers and the new version is online. There is no capping on the numer of users. We are still seeing some affects of the database overload and will work relentlessly on resolving those issues. Thank you for your Patience. The CCP Team.

Thanks to the valiant defense of the Patch Squad, the advance of the pirates was thwarted in a few heroic battles last night, at least for now. But the hordes of barbarians will probably not be stopped. The Squad is pleading for reinforcements as they continue their fight. Any help will be welcomed.

CONCORD has issued a warning statement of a suspected increase in pirate activity in the very near future. Experts on the situation believe that the pirates are intensifying their activity in response to dramatic increase in space travellers within regions traditionally associated with pirates. In order to acclimatize space farers to this new and dangerous situation the DED will make an exceptional effort to keep the pirates at bay, but these efforts can only be sustained for 24 hours or so.

Dear players, this is a very sad announcement we have to make. Ever since the patch at 12:00 GMT yesterday we have had serious issues with several aspects of the game. We have spent the better part of today in an effort to set things right but since the consequences of these issues, especially an exploit involving excessive insurance payout, are of a magnitude we cannot overlook we have decided to turn back the clock and roll back the state of the game to the way it was before applying the patch...

The Customers Support Service would like to make the following announcement. Due to the extreme petition load we have been experiencing this last weekend, the petition lines are now backed up and response time has been slowed somewhat because of that. Rest assured that we will answer all petitions and are working around the clock trying to resolve all issues. We would like to ask players not to file multiple petitions, because that only slows down the petition queue as we are obligated to proces...

Pirates in low security areas have now become much more powerful (as you requested), so venturing out there without the protection of a few cruisers and frigates is probably a very bad idea. They also have an improved and more diverse arsenal, and you might have to equip yourself with adequate defense equipment to dodge that. For those unfortunate newbies that found themself trapped in such a system after the patch, please make a petition to ask for transfer to next system beside it.