Elite Dangerous Maintenance Status
Elite Dangerous server maintenance is happening today—with downtime scheduled from 7 am UTC to 10:30 am UTC as the Vanguards Patch 2 rolls out. You know the drill: those eager Commanders (me included) who plan their morning jumps around patch windows are probably sipping coffee impatiently, staring at the launcher, and flipping between Twitter updates. We've been told the downtime estimate is three and a half hours, but anyone who’s played Elite knows that “estimated” sometimes means “maybe, if the Thargoids don’t interfere.”
On Twitter, Elite Dangerous (@EliteDangerous) announced that servers would go offline at 7 AM UTC on September 2 to roll out Vanguard's Patch 2.
On Twitter, Elite Dangerous (@EliteDangerous) announced that servers have gone offline as the team prepares to roll out **Elite Dangerous: Vanguards Patch 2.
During this patch, Frontier's finally letting us install the Bar/Bartender on Squadron Carriers—so next time your squad finishes a bounty run, you can actually stop for a drink and talk smack about gravity wells. Only the Squadron Leader gets to manage purchase orders now; probably wise, since last time our group messed around with permissions, our carrier ended up buying limpets by the ton (still not sure who did that—pretty sure it wasn’t me, but I kept the leftovers).
On the privacy front, you’re now able to flip your carrier’s visibility to Private or restrict it to your Squadron. If you’ve ever been in a system overflowing with random commanders poking at your ship’s exterior, this is a small but beautiful mercy. The update also tweaks the Squadron Bank so members can drop in contributions—though if your squad’s anything like mine, donations might come with guilt-tripping in chat: “Hey, I bought all those Sensor Fragments, so...can we top off the carrier fund now?” Not everything is new features, of course; there’s a slew of bug fixes too.
Crashes in Apex Shuttles, blank livery UI for certain languages (Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, French), and the weird issue where Senior Officers could buy Carriers (and then promptly crash the game)—all in theory solved. I particularly appreciate the fix for On Foot Mission Board filtering; last week, I spent ten minutes clicking through jobs only to find out nothing matched. Two thumbs up for practical fixes like those.
I admit, a few of my favorite bugs have been squashed—yes, it’s better now, but there was something comically tragic about your ship name disappearing when tossed in the Squadron Bank. If you’re reading this hunched over your desk, hoping to log in, keep an eye on the official forums and social feeds.
Updates will come as soon as anything shifts, which is comforting, but let's be real—the community will know about server restarts ten seconds after they happen. Overall, this patch isn’t upending the galaxy, but it feels like a decent slice of polish, quality-of-life upgrades, and squashed bugs. Not every update can be a seismic event, but this one’s got enough for a few excited Discord pings and maybe—if we’re lucky—a quiet, uninterrupted play session later today.
