Nothing to blame here except FDev as they need to scale the servers they rent/lease to take the load. They made the call to design the game the way it is with dependencies on servers, and to not support an offline mode. This is what happens when single players want to play. And it will get worse as the player base increases unless they react. There is a holiday surge but it didn't happen in the past 24hrs alone; it's happened over the past few days. Suspect other issues are occurring as we've seen this Sunday night thing before.
As far as the Steam volume of players (as any sort of metric of success or popularity) it may help to calibrate one's opinion on "lots" and "many". Take Fallout 4 which has roughly 482,000 players online at one time peak in the past 30 days vs. Elite which had just 18,000. Daily averages are 231,000 for Fallout vs. Elite at 3,970. And the trend is showing a drop-off of the daily averages steadily declining since September. There is currently a spike for Elite but lets see how long this lasts.
