New World remains offline as 'technical difficulties' force extended downtime

Amazon's MMO New World is a major hit, but it's also had some struggles since it went live last week. Long server queues have been the biggest issue, but it hit another bump in the road today with some unspecified "technical difficulties" that have forced multiple extensions to downtime for maintenance.

New World was taken down at 6 am ET for what was expected to be about four hours to roll out the 1.01 update. "As each world finishes their maintenance period, we will be bringing up these worlds in order to ensure that everyone will be able to return to Aeternum as fast as possible," Amazon said in the initial announcement.

Roughly four hours later, though, the studio added another hour onto that target, meaning the game would be back at 11 am ET. Just before that, the downtime was extended another two hours.

"Unfortunately, we are having some technical difficulties and need to extend the maintenance for two more hours," Amazon said. "We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and support!"

A one-hour extension isn't a big deal on its own, but another two hours—seven in total so far, with possibly more to come—is definitely unusual, or at least unexpected to the game's legions of players patiently waiting to wage war (or just do some 'relaxing' fishing). Amazon hasn't said what exactly is holding things up, but I've reached out for comment and will update if I receive a reply.