Nintendo announced that their online outage was caused by the sudden surge going directly to their servers beginning on Christmas Day with the influx of people accessing the eShop and trying to connect their network accounts.

Nintendo posted on update yesterday on their Facebook page:

"Thank you very much for your patience while we perform maintenance on the Nintendo eShop and Nintendo Network. We sincerely appreciate your ongoing support. We wanted to share some details on what is causing this downtime, and update you on the current outage in service.

The initial outage was primarily caused by a one-time surge in demand over the recent holidays, compounded by the following:

1) An influx of new Nintendo Network accounts being created and accessing the Nintendo eShop.

2) Existing Nintendo 3DS account information being moved to new Nintendo Network accounts.

We are continuing to adjust our network to meet the needs of all our services and applications. To ensure our global audience has an expected level of consistency in service, we took the Nintendo eShop on Nintendo 3DS offline. We expect to have it back online no later than 4 a.m. ET on Dec. 29, but may have to perform more maintenance in the future.

We truly apologize for the inconsistencies in our online services. We are working hard around the clock to fully restore these functions, and will continue to keep you updated on our progress."

Not only was the Nintendo eShop down, but various other features such as Netflix, Hulu,YouTube, and the online browser were down all across Nintendo's consoles including the Wii and DS.

According to Nintendo everything is back to normal.