The Nintendo Japanese customer support Twitter account has warned users that there will be interruptions to servers during the Christmas weekend. The company is planning on focusing its server capacity on Nintendo Account creation. However, it warned that “it is expected that Nintendo Accounts will not be created immediately.” The company then recommended that first-time users create their accounts in advance of the Christmas weekend. Check out the full tweet and translation below.
今週末は #ニンテンドーアカウント のサーバーにアクセスが集中し、ニンテンドーアカウントがすぐに作成できないなどの影響が予想されます。
はじめてNintendo Switchファミリーを利用される予定の方は、事前に作成しておくことをおすすめします。
— 任天堂サポート (@nintendo_cs) December 20, 2021
Translation courtesy of DeepL:
“Access to the #Nintendo Account servers will be concentrated this weekend, and it is expected that you will not be able to create a Nintendo Account immediately.
If you are planning to use the Nintendo Switch family for the first time, we recommend that you create an account in advance.”
Nintendo seems to be trying to get ahead of any server issues that could arise this weekend after the catastrophe last year. On Christmas day last year, the Nintendo Switch eShop servers went down completely. The downtime meant that new and old Switch owners alike couldn’t purchase or download games during Christmas day. The cause of the outage was almost certainly related to the many people who received Nintendo Switch consoles and were trying to connect to the Nintendo servers at the same time.
Nintendo is alone; it’s common for companies to experience server issues on Christmas day. Especially companies whose products are popular Christmas gifts. Back in 2014, both Xbox Live and PlayStation Network were victims of Christmas day hacks that caused the services to be offline. In the case of PlayStation Network, it took a few days for everything to be back up and running.
Hopefully, with Nintendo focusing on account creation for the Christmas weekend, that means the company was able to identify the issue from last year and has prepared so it won’t happen again.