Communication outage today (http://www.eveonline.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=4269&tid=1)
9 December 2010, 2:23 pm
In order to test how chat affects our proxy servers, we will shut off text chat today December 9, 2010 at 18:00 UTC. Chat will be reactivated five minutes later at 18:05 UTC. You will be able to join and leave chat channels as usual but no text chat will be possible. This will not affect the EVE Mail system.
Source: eveonline.com | news from EVE (http://www.eveonline.com/)