Each of these servers have their own local databases that house the information for the characters who play on them. This is necessary because there's an inordinate amount of players enjoying D2R Items to just continually upload their data to one singlecentral location.
"Most of your actions are made against this local database due to its speed, and your character is locked' there to maintain the integrity of each individual's character record. The global database has an additional backup in case the primary fails."
The regional databases regularly forward information back at intervals to the central database in this way Blizzard has a singular record (with backups) of your thicc level 88 Barbarians, Necromancers, and so on. Which sounds all well and wonderful until the central database gets full and the entire system, just like the engineers that work on it, needs a nap.
"On Sat. morning Pacific hour, our servers experienced an outage that was global due to an unexpected, substantial increase in traffic. This was a brand new threshold that our servers had not been through before prior to launch," Blizzard explained.
This was made worse by an update we had launched earlier that day with the intention of improving performance around game creation. Both of these factors caused our database to become overloaded, causing it to time out. We made the decision to roll back the Friday update that we had previously released hoping that it would lessen the burden on our servers as we moved into Sunday, while also allowing us time to look into the root of the issue.
On Sunday, however, it became evident that what we had done on Saturday was not enough-we saw an even higher rise in traffic that caused us to experience another issue. Our d2r items for sale game servers were aware of the database's disconnect and attempted to reconnect, repeatedly, which meant that the database didn't have time to catch up with the work we had completed.