Looks as though Christmas Day was great for gamers worldwide, as the onslaught of traffic stemming from new hardware activations bombarded the likes of Microsoft's Xbox Live, Sony Entertainment Network, Nintendo's eShop, and even Valve's Steam platform to the point of going offline.
Currently, as of this writing, Nintendo's portion is the only one still down for the count across all four devices: Wii U, Wii, 3DS and DSi.
For starters, Kotaku revealed on Christmas Day evening that the Steam servers were down for most of the day. The platform is back up and running now, but there's speculation that the holiday deals may be behind the performance issues, such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Skyrim receiving a 75 percent discount. Left 4 Dead 2 costing absolutely nothing until Thursday afternoon probably didn't help the traffic issues.
On the console front, blame the new PlayStation 4 and Xbox One being unwrapped and installed under the TV, and new hardware sales of the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS/2DS. Game Informer provided a long list of updates covering the entire day, starting with word that Sony and Nintendo shops were offline. Eventually, the PlayStation Shop came back online, but Nintendo's eShop remained down.
By Game Informer's third update, the site saw that Steam went offline, and believed that Valve's free Left 4 Dead 2 offering was the culprit. Then by update #4, there were reports that Xbox Live was having stability issues while the Wii U began seeing improvement. Again, this was all happening on Christmas Day.
By the fifth update to Game Informer's original story, Xbox Live reportedly tanked in performance. Microsoft reported that social and gaming aspects were "limited." Meanwhile, Steam was mostly still up through the sixth and seventh updates, although the Steam storefront could not be viewed.
By the ninth update on Thursday morning, Steam, Sony Entertainment Network and Xbox Live were back to normal levels of performance. Nintendo's network is still down, a problem that's reportedly related to the eShop.
Destructoid reports that over in Japan, Nintendo was forced to remove the just-launched Pokemon bank due to the current problems with the network. The app provides a free Celebis and allows customers to store their Pokemon from the "X" and "Y" versions in the cloud. The app went live in Japan yesterday and was supposedly slated for a North American release on Friday.
