Steam, for some reason, has server maintenance from 3-6PM PST on Tuesdays
Would love to hear other stories of businesses doing similar activities during sane weekday hours.
It requires specific technology choices and planning ahead, but it is especially simple in the web era because they all go through load balancers which are redundant themselves.
The opposite example was Blizzard taking down WoW for half a day every week, which is an absurdly long time.
Even if they had a single server per game world instance, they could have orchestrated updates using automation to take each instance down for a few minutes instead of all of them at once for many hours.
Steam is under heavy use at all times, and the lowest user count is roughly from 3PM-2AM PST.
And being partially off for 3 hours a week is pretty far from "business hours".