A Club Penguin member's player card.

An alert to all Club Penguin users has gone out today, following the meltdown of a majority of the popular game’s servers.

An abnormally large number of Club Penguin users logged onto the website this morning, causing the penguin slaves who run the site to retire to a cold shower. We believe this large number is as a result of the recent international release of a Nintendo DS game, which has lit up the blogosphere on various dedicated blogs, such as Club Penguin Cheats Blog, Club Penguin Cheats Guide, and Straw000’s Awesome Club Penguin Cheats Blog.

Members are even beginning to socialise with real penguins – flights to Antarctica have risen by 500%, and Linux usage has risen by 75%.

Club Penguin is not run by actual computers, but an enormous army of real penguins. As such, the service should return fairly quickly, once the penguins have been fed fish and air-conditioning at the game’s California headquarters is returned to sub-zero.