The long awaited and highly anticipated data center travel feature that has been promised for a couple years now went up in today's 6.18 update, but was almost immediately taken down due to congestion. According to Square Enix, they were getting upwards of 15,000 data center travel requests a minute, a staggering number no doubt. This caused a huge strain on the servers and they ultimately elected to disable the service for the time being.

The feature was meant to connect players who were on inaccessible servers without having to create alt characters. Heaven knows I have multiple friends on different data centers, making it quite a blessing. When the feature will be active again is still unknown, but this is no doubt massively disappointing to players who were excited to visit other worlds, and potentially troubling if there are some trapped on other data centers without a means to get back. Some are just forever stuck in the Balmung Quicksands.

Update: The feature is now fully operational, although queues times will vary depending on the congestion.