In the course of the last six months, Nikon has had several planned outages of their cloud structure offerings. These last about nine hours, and impact Nikon Imaging Cloud, Nikon Image Space, NX Studio, and NX Tether. Nikon does send out emails in advance of these outages—the next one is February 12th—but those go to my junk folder and likely yours, too.
Here's the thing: Nikon wants us to use those services. The next planned one is basically the entire working hours here on the US East Coast. So using Nikon Imaging Cloud to automatically move images from camera to my own cloud services is out that day.
Meanwhile, if you don't use NX Studio or NX Tether regularly, you may be on their 30-day sign-in time out at the time of Nikon's planned server maintenance. That means you wouldn't be able to use those products that day. As it happens, I don't use NX Tether often, so I pretty much always have to re-sign in every time I use it. I just won't be able to do that on February 12th.
Ultimately, any cloud-type service needs to be essentially uninterrupted. It's one thing when there's a temporary outage due to something unplanned and needing immediate attention. But those are extremely rare on the services I use, and generally quite short in duration (not nine hours, as Nikon plans). The best companies also have swap-in-place systems with automatic fallback, which clearly Nikon does not have.
This regular offline bit Nikon is doing is one of those things I call "frictions." Add up enough small frictions and the customer goes elsewhere. I've written for years that I don't believe Nikon is a world class software company, and this is another of those places where that shows up. Nikon has been basically teaching people to avoid connectivity with their cameras (e.g. all the SnapBridge issues, including how slowly it pairs). If that's what you teach people, why are you in the software business?