Mario Kart 8’s online play and services will be interrupted for a bit tonight, as they go down for planned maintenance. This maintenance comes ahead of the launch of the first DLC pack for the game, which adds eight brand new tracks to the game, three new characters, and six new karts.
The maintenance will affect online play, rankings, ghost data transfer, and anything else that requires the use of online servers, in the game. What this means is, if you are planning on playing Mario Kart 8 tonight, you might as well play it solo, or gather some friends and play it locally. Online will probably be a bit of a mess.
The timings for this maintenance period are from Wednesday, November 12, 2014 11:50 PM to Thursday, November 13, 2014 1:00 AM Pacific Time. It is likely that the DLC pack for the game will be available as soon as the maintenance period ends. If you have already bought the DLC pack, you can expect your console to download it automatically as soon as it is made available, as long as it is in standby mode, and as long as you have enough space left on your console.