UPDATE: Destiny should be back online at this time.
Bungie has issued a reminder that Destiny will be going down to perform some maintenance today starting at 8am PDT, which is 11am EDT. The offline period will last for six hours, so expect it to be back up around 5pm Eastern Time.
Reminder that Destiny will be going offline today around 8AM PDT
You should receive a warning upon logging into Destiny, letting you know about the outage. The message refers to it as a momentary interruption, which is a bit of an understatement for six hours of downtime.
The updates will bring the game completely offline, preventing login and online play. Once the updates are complete you can get right back on, barring any sort of delay that pushes it later in the day.
No major changes will be seen upon coming back to the game. Instead this maintenance is meant to prepare Destiny for a few future updates. With big things coming in the future, like Destiny: The Taken King, Bungie has to dive in every once in a while and do backend changes.
Trials of Osiris has already been disabled in anticipation of the maintenance, so don’t be surprised if you can’t access it even prior to the outage period.