Users who were logged into the game during yesterday's Tournaments test may have noticed some stability issues during that period of time. To better explain the cause of these issues, I need to provide a bit of rudimentary insight into how the game handles account balances.
When a user logs into the game, the game sends a "wallet check" to the Shop server to find out the balance in the user's Gems wallet, Trainer Tokens wallet, and Tournament Tickets wallet, and then displays those quantities to the user in the game's navigation bar. This same "wallet check" is made whenever the balance in any of the user's wallets changes, such as earning or redeeming Trainer Tokens, or redeeming Tournament Tickets to join a tournament.
Now that I've got that out of the way...
After the Tournament test started yesterday we began seeing a spike in "wallet check" failures, due to the rapid influx of players redeeming Tournament Tickets. The system is configured to handle these types of sudden spikes, but something in the communication chain was preventing wallet balances from being consistently communicated between servers. Within a short window of time, these failures began to affect the "wallet checks" for other areas of the game, including the ability to log into (or remain logged into) the game. We shut down the Tournaments test early and did a server reset to restore game stability. The team has identified the cause of these failures, and is actively working to resolve the issue. To limit the risk of reintroducing this instability, we will be putting a temporary hold on Tournaments testing until we can put a fix in place.
On a related note, a small number of users had their Tournament Tickets stuck in escrow as a result of these "wallet check" failures. We will be purging the escrow system of all Tournament Tickets before the next testing period, which will return those tickets to their respective users' wallets.
source:
http://www.pokemontcg.com/forums/showthread.php?40653-Tournaments-Alpha-Testing-Status-Update