IIRC after the big nuke it was pretty chaotic service wise, the Forums didn't come back properly for a few days and a lot of people couldn't re-register due to the Forums being down or having problems, I think I managed to re-register in the wee small hours of the 18th when the traffic had died off a bit, lots of people were still on slow connections too which didn't help, pages timing out and hanging etc. due to the heavy load.