I too was there for the Simcity fiasco. I think the woman in charge resigned or something?
Anyways, I think a small piece of free content might be in order, like maybe 1 free custom airport of our choosing or something like that.
EDIT: In fact, the Simcity fiasco was almost the same, due to online requirements. This from PC Magazine article:
there wasn’t enough server space to go round. Players were met with frequent crashes, extreme latency, exceedingly long load times, disconnections, and delayed downloads. Swathes were unable to get into the game at all, left endlessly hanging in the launch menu