From Stardocks president:

"The challenge we're running into is that our NAT facilitator servers are getting hammered by the number of requests. That's the most significant issue as it results in users not being able to connect to each other. The solution to this is partly more servers (which we're doing right now) and partly a code update to connect users without using so many resources. We expect to have this largely resolved in the next 24 hours or so.

The other thing we have to do is isolate the warez users off the main server branch so that legitimate customers aren't competing with the 100k+ warez people playing the game for database resources.

The only reason why we haven't had this happen on other games is because we've never had anything like this many users in such a short amount of time. Sins of a Solar Empire was a huge hit but its success came not from an immediate burst of users but rather sustained long term growth which allowed us to keep enhancing the infrastructure as needed with minimal issues for users."