Well this sure is interesting. According to Drysc, a good number of realms (in fact, too many to list here) are skipping the weekly maintenance this week. They will be online today during the scheduled downtime to undergo a series of diagnostic tests, and will be closely monitored during the week for any signs of trouble. The play experience on the realms will not be effected by the diagnostics.

Hmmm...I don't want to read too much into this, but maybe Blizzard is looking at eliminating the need for the weekly maintenance, or maybe the servers will rotate maintenance weeks, so a good number of them are always up. Granted, they'd still need downtime on patch days, but not having the servers down every week would be nice for a lot of folks. As I am not much of a morning and afternoon player, I rarely notice the downtime, but if I was someone who worked odd hours, I would learn to hate Tuesdays pretty quick. Or, as Woild points out in the comments, if I was in Australia and the servers go down right in the middle of prime time, well...that would be pretty annoying. The only downside would be if too few servers are left online, thus leading to the inevitable griefing and other shenanigans that take place when a lot of realms are offline.

Again, this is pure conjecture on my part, and this could be much ado about nothing, but it sure would be nice if I was right!

[Update: Added a reference to Woild's comment.]

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