The downtime was to allow a copy of the system to be made in advance of a hardware upgrade in IT (when this happens there will be a full validation). In this instance no changes were made it's just that the system was unavailable while they did the prep work. Everything went as planned and there were no effects on the work or how the LIMS functioned. IT have done their own change control for the hardware upgrade overall but as no actual changes were made during the down time, so would you still validate?