It isn't Christmas without online service outages

As sure as day follows night, this Christmas saw a batch of major online service problems as servers were presumably crushed by the weight of thousands of giftees trying to activate new hardware and software for the very first time. It's far from the first time this has happened, and it's not always mere overload that causes these events: last Christmas, for instance, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live made headlines when they were maliciously brought offline.