Minecraft, the indie hit for PC whose popularity has gone meteoric of late, has found its servers overwhelmed. Playing the game isn't affected by the trouble, however. As such, its creator has declared it "free-to-play" until he can restore order.
Per a barebones page on the Minecraft page, Markus Persson, aka "Notch," says that "Minecraft got way too popular for this humble server. I've had to disable everything fancy to even get it to run."
Presently, registering an account, buying the game and user verification for online servers are all inactive. But playing the game and player skins still work.
"Until this all gets sorted out, I'm officially calling a 'free-to-play weekend,' or however long this will take to fix," says Notch. "You will need to have a paid account to play it later on when this gets fixed though."
The official page (linked below) has download links for Windows, MacOS and Linux-supported versions of Minecraft.
Minecraft Offline [Minecraft.net, thank you to all who tipped this]