US Launch plagued with server issues

Ubisoft servers not able to handle the US Launch for The Division.

For the start, the game needed patch download of around 3GB in size which worked. As soon as I entered the game, it started with a video then to character creation which ended up crashing. After that the video restarted which I wasn't able to skip. Second time at the character creation screen worked and was able to play the game for about 30 minutes.

At this point the ubisoft website is down, uplay service is not working correctly, and the game keeps trying to connect but stalls and shows a Mike 20170828 error.

More Error Codes

Very disappointing so far to see the issue happening in 2016.

Update:
A screen popped up with "Attention: Due to server errors, your characters are currently locked. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you. You can force unlock them and revert back to the previous saved data, but some progress may be lost."

I did a force unlock, and it seems so far I'm back in the game, around 45 mins of downtime.