Been three days, still can't purchase Minecraft. Something up with Mojang's payment processor?

Hiya guyssssssssssss and galssssssss,

I've been trying to help my sister buy Minecraft for her son as part of his Christmas gifts (he got hooked playing on my notebook while I've been visiting them for Christmas... sorry, sis).

Anyhow, minecraft.net itself has been hit or miss for us for three days or so now. Page loads on the site itself are taking on the order of 3-5 minutes to load if they do at all, about 25% of the time we're getting 500 server errors from an nginx cache somewhere along the line, and maybe half the time nothing loads. After a day of trying we were able to register a username for him, and we've been trying since yesterday to purchase his license.

I've managed to get to the point of entering our phone number for the card processing SMS message about five times now, I've tried two different cell numbers on different carriers, and we never get the confirmation message.

Is something going on with Mojang's servers or their card processing service's servers? Was there a post-christmas rush? I've tried the support page at minecraft.net, but there's no relevant option for "your servers appear to be hosed", and I didn't find a contact email or phone number anywhere.

I'd really like to get my nephew up and running, does anyone have any suggestions?

edit: I know it's not the internet connection, I can get to sites anywhere in the world with lightning speed, aside from minecraft.net. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.