Originally Posted by golfmad

Maybe they meant to write something like this:

"We know our members are in different time zones around the world so it's really difficult to avoid all disruption as we upgrade our systems. To minimize this, we're going to be taking our systems down for six hours overnight UK time on 4th October between 1am and 7am BST. During that time you won't be able to do[list of things]. Once this is completed you will notice these improvements [second list]. We apologize for the inconvenience as we make these improvements to our systems."

They need a staging server where they develop and test their changes then they just need to use a few hours to migrate the tested upgrades from the staging server to the live servers. It's not rocket science.