The following is a direction translation of http://www.playonline.com/home/index-j.html

Although over 24 hours have passed since PlayOnline and FFXI service commenced at noon on May 16, the PlayOnline service is still experiencing problems which hinder use of the service. Following is a report of the current status of the service and plans for recovery.

We have determined that the above two causes are primarily responsible for the troubles which are currently occurring.

While we have diverted all resources into solving these problems, it is unfortunately impossible to completely resolve them today. As a result, after consideration of what further actions to take, we have decided to temporarily suspend PlayOnline service, and set tomorrow (May 18) at 9:00am [JST] as our goal for completing resolution of the problems and resuming service.

We recognize that this action betrays the hopes of Final Fantasy players who have waited patiently for the release of Final Fantasy XI, and it was an extremely difficult decision for us as well, but we have made this decision in order to resolve these problems as quickly as possible.

We are making modifications to relieve the delays in authorization, but we expect a large number of concentrated accesses when the service is restarted, which may result in timeouts or other temporary difficulties. We ask that if you encounter such a problem, please do not continually retry the connection, but log out from PlayOnline and wait 30 minutes or more before reconnecting.

We will continue to post information on this page as soon as any more information is known with regards to trouble resolution or service resumption. We ask for your understanding, and promise to improve our service so that problems such as these do not occur again.