Ubisoft have a companion to the PC version of their recent problematic Assassin's Creed game Unity, web-based and named AC Initiates. Right now Ubisoft have had to put it into a 'continued state of maintenance' for a temporary period of time. It doesn't affect the playing of the game, but it does hinder their ability to access gold Initiates chests dotted around the Paris map.
Fortunately for once in the Unity story, Ubisoft have foreseen the problem and put into a place a fix for the maintenance period. All the gold Initiate chests have been made accessible to all players until AC Initiates is out of maintenance.
Breaking the news on the Unity forums Assassin’s Creed community manager, EscoBlades said that the reason for the extended period of maintenance was down to an effort to "minimize the effect from outages to your experience during this time, as well as to allow [them] work on ensuring the technical stability of the platform."
"Although AC Initiates will be in maintenance and thus unavailable to access via the web or console browsers, all gold Initiates chests are now unlocked in game for online players."
As it says above, you will need to be online to access the chests in game. And be quick too if you wish to reap some rewards, Ubisoft haven't given a concrete end date for AC Initiates to come back up but have said that they aim to keep it in maintenance for the "holiday period".