You didn't tell your office that you were "sick" this morning, right? Throw on some pants and redact it. The Final Fantasy XIV open beta will, in fact, not be launching as Square Enix said it would this August 31. The dev team has spotted a few "critical bugs" in the game and the test has been pushed back as a result.
The news that things weren't going as planned comes on the heels of the beta sign-up site going down for a period of time. When it came back, Square Enix left a message stating that the open beta test was being "postponed" for an unspecified time. It also noted the confirmation of said critical bugs (via Massively).
Plans to hold an open beta are still on, apparently, since Square Enix wrote that "a new schedule will be released at a later date." And chances are you'll be hearing about that new date rather soon--the full game launches on September 30, after all.