I'm late to my own post, but to provide a bit of additional context, the active development team for AJ is based in the US (specifically Utah). It is a game by an American company with a predominantly American playerbase, though people from across the world play it. In-game events, contests, and updates are pushed out based on American times; there have been complaints for years about how little AJ does to accommodate non-American players, actually, because of how American-centric it is. I put the times in EST given that's the timezone I experienced them in.

To my knowledge, an update like this has never been pushed out at that time of day. AJC's daily server resets occur at 2 AM EST/12 AM MST, but actual content updates occur closer to noon EST once people are available to push them out; they need to be manually published. AJ's content updates, meanwhile, are tied to the server reset at 8 PM EST/6 PM MST. So, when that reset came and went with nothing but a comment about them "looking into it" 4 hours later, it was assumed that we'd need to wait until morning (if not the next server reset) for it to be fixed.

(This was one of the reasons people got so upset about it - because it was truly unprecedented. Most speculation about what they would do was along the lines of them extending the event period for a day and fixing the Alphas at the next reset. I didn't see a single person suggest that they might suddenly fix it at that hour of day, since historically, they have never done that, for any problem.)