Solved

Game is unplayable at moment

Sorry, sincerely. It is due to the huge demand on the service, we are at new record levels tonight and we need another couple of days to address the capacity requirements for this level of players.

It's simply extra capacity that needs adding. Players are currently flooding in faster than ever. Basically a server or two are going to need an upgrade. We know exactly what the bottlenecks on them are and why this is happening, but we are not 100% ready to perform the upgrade yet, it will take another day or two before it is fully ready. When the upgrade occurs it will require a maintenance window, so we'll let you know in advance.

We have many servers, some are unaffected while others have problems. The issues never affect everyone, but tonight they are much broader than usual due to the new record number of users online.

All issues can actually be traced to one place. Fixing it is easier said than done, though. I don't want to give too much away but we're confident our "short-term" solution (which should be ready within days) will work for the next few months and by that time the long-term solution will be in place which can last for years.

I can understand the frustration. I've shut down everything that may add extra load to the servers and we are working behind the scenes on an upgrade to roll out as soon as it is ready. It's true that we are growing very rapidly and it is exciting, but obviously nights like this undermine everything, especailly your enjoyment, so we take it very seriously. We saw it coming earlier in the week from the rate we were growing, but we haven't been able to get the necessary upgrades ready in time to keep up with the growth. It is only days away, and I think some of the measures taken tonight will help tomorrow be better anyway.

Meeting the demand has been our single biggest challenge since launching the apps, but each week we get better at this, and I mentioned a long-term solution we're working on a few times. It's far beyond what we would have been capable of doing before the apps, but thanks to the support from you guys we're collaborating with people that have scaled projects far beyond where we are now. The big solutions we are working on with them will come further down the line. For the short-term we have some more obvious solutions that address the direct bottlenecks that you saw tonight.