The Nintendo Switch eShop is back online after experiencing an outage on Christmas Day

As kids and adults alike flocked to the Nintendo eShop, eager to spend the gift cards they found in their stockings, that excitement was quickly spoiled by the eShop error screen. According to a report from Kotaku, the annual holiday hike brought the Nintendo Switch eShop down again for a while. Service was brought back 24 hours later on December 26th at approximately 4:30 AM ET.

During the outage, Nintendo sent out a tweet saying that the company is "working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible." It also includes a link to Nintendo's online service status page, where it displays updates about any current outages.

As noted on the status page, problems began to arise around 4AM ET on Christmas morning, and were not resolved until 24 hours later. The company did not provide any additional information on the outage, stating vaguely: "We are currently experiencing difficulties with our network services. Please try again later. We will apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused." I'm sorry." Sorry." She later updated that statement to acknowledge that the store was back online.

In a timeline of the outages shown on DownDetector, it appears that the problems peaked around 9 a.m. ET on Christmas morning, but then subsided. I was able to successfully open the Nintendo Switch eShop, as well as download some updates that night at around 4:30. ET, a sign that things were starting to come back online.

The outage did not affect any other online activity such as playing online games. This prevented players from buying and downloading any content from the eShop — which might have been a hassle for those looking to fill their new Switch with digital games.

The Nintendo eShop went down during Christmas last year, and the company didn't fully restore service until the next day. Nintendo also warned players that the eShop could be overloaded this holiday weekend, and advised them to create a Nintendo account ahead of the holidays, which is perfect for gifting someone a Switch on Christmas Day. Not there. Huh.