Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised: not only is the service incredibly complex, but earlier today creator Stephen Wolfram reported a "small snag" - a failure during a dummy run:
"We have several supercomputer-class compute clusters. One of our tests was to use one cluster to simulate traffic and run it against the other cluster. And when we did that last night, we found that the through-put we got degraded horribly when we increased the amount of traffic that we were pushing from one cluster to the other.
"So we don’t quite understand that, and that would very much degrade the through-put that we could get."
It's interesting, too, that Wolfram Alpha attempted to deflect the hype (and likely disappointment) early on by asserting that it was not a Google competitor, but then ramped up the hype once again by live-streaming the incredibly challenging launch process.
Oh well, grab a seat, people...the embed is below and there's plenty of salty snacks to go around.