The issues related to Epic players logging in to the North American and European PC/Mac megaservers have been resolved at this time. If you continue to experience difficulties at login, please restart your client. Thank you for your patience!
Why isn't console patch available during downtime?
The client companies control it. In this case, for whatever reason they don't give the go ahead to Sony and Microsoft until the maintainence cycle is over. I'm sure they have a reason. Its probably financial and has to do with costs for their server architecture and being able to roll back from failure.
I concur. The lease they could do is give us something to read while we wait. Rather than twiddling our thumbs. Impatiently. Hey how about thumb wrestling? No, that's even worse