Just received the same message - it seems doubtful this is a sudden surge in interest Chess.com usage.
I agree. I don't buy that there has been a surge of (legitimate) chess interest in the last month that has caused this. I'd guess that there has been a surge of fake/bot accounts, possibly as part of a DDoS attack. Either that, or the development team messed up something major while trying to integrate features/data from the Play Magnus merger.
I'm a fairly new user, so please bear with me. Is this "502 error" or "Database Overloaded" something regular or some exception?
It is not very funny, but it is the the fact, that before I bought the annual premium subscription, I never had any problems, and from the moment I purchased it started some "502 error" and now "Database Overloaded". An unfortunate coincidence... 
Sounds like they should fire the IT leader. Cloud services are supposed to automatically cover surges by adding (or subtracting) resources on demand. Big name retailers go through this all the time during holiday rushes. Surprising that chess.com is living in the past, IT wise.
If your traffic DOUBLED in the past few weeks, I (too) suspect you are under a bot attack.
I'm a fairly new user, so please bear with me. Is this "502 error" or "Database Overloaded" something regular or some exception?
It would occasionally happen, but very rarely. This is something that has cropped up since the holidays.
The irony continues: trying to use this website is getting more challenging than the game of chess itself!
I don't know why I bother paying servos down is all to common these days seems the none paying members get all the same things that I use and as said lychess never has any of the same issues and it's all free ,I also like the not knowing which country I'm playing with as I don't like the French /Russian and one to many players from India for my liking .Warnings for abusive chat when I have not been abusive or even used chat is also getting a bore .
My paid Diamond subscription is up in a few weeks and if the "database overload" continues I WILL cancel and go back to being a "freeloader" or Lychess user. I don't need to pay $$$ for the frustration of not being able to use the site..
I think this thing has happened much more frequently the last few weeks. Please restrict new players/guest players until you have fixed the problem, which might be bots. Right now, nobody (?) is able to play, so I think paying members should be compensated in some way.
Since I pay lots of $$$ to use this site, I recommend giving priority to those that pay $$$!!
I agree with that - they should have backup servers for paying subs!
The news is that chess traffic has doubled during the last 2 weeks (read: Tata Steel Chess 2023)
Well RIP to my 51 daily games.
Massive site with a big development team and they can't even keep their servers running properly. Its sad. Smaller chess sites (no names) with less of a dev team can keep their servers running, but chess.com is having "traffic issues"
oof
The site has been experiencing almost a doubling of traffic. A lot of sites would have issues in similar situations.
https://www.chess.com/blog/CHESScom/chess-is-booming-and-our-servers-are-struggling
Hey! Whaddya' know?! I got in! But it took so long, I forgot what I was gonna' say.......
I cancelled my subscription. This is unacceptable. We're paying money for this. Get your stuff together and fix this.
I don't care if this is caused by a doubling of traffic. If you take the steps of covering a Major International Chess Tournament you should have had the foresight to make sure the servers and bandwidth could manage the load increase.
Constantly get 502's on this site, not so sure how accurate this "unprecedented new amounts of users" is when it's not uncommon to begin with
i deleted my alt account centuries ago. i imagine that deleting them would definitely help get the servers up and running again