I don't think that was the case, or they'd have kicked it off an hour ahead of schedule.
Somebody got 'trigger-happy' because even the german servers got booted at 5 mins to... same as we did, and they weren't even on maintenance, so got restored a short while later.
Particularly irritating when I was half way through finding the collectables, and had just wasted a fairy fire buff to highlight these, in the forlorn hope that a stray pumpkin might appear, and devastating on the French server where the final golem escaped unscathed, and left me 26 pumpkins short of my Grim Reaper on there.
Then to make matters even worse, after setting off explorers etc... today, UBI decided to completely stuff this up with a far too late announcement that they were taking down the servers again. As golems have respawned later and later each night, they were already in the 'danger zone', not to mention the loss of an entire second run at collectables, and explorers all returning after this announced time. Way to go to screw up an event! Couldn't even set up an adventure to be commenced tomorrow.