There may be an issue with the game code itself that is resulting in these weird glitches we are all seeing. I have teammates in the raid who mysteriously die while we're all in the aura of immortality. They just explode for no reason and they get either Misadventure or Killed by the Architects on their screen. Who knows WTF just happened. But the point is, this game is not hosted on "servers", in the sense of computers in a central location that we all connect to and that Bungie has direct control over. Its P2P, the "server" in the sense of client/server architecture is one of the people in the lobby. So when OP says "Servers are generally bad anyway, but "Christmas break" apparently means there is no maintenance etc?!" its just plain incorrect. They need to fix the game code to clear up these glitches and it would be nice if the networking features could be made a little more lag-resistant (or at least prioritize matchmaking by connection rather than "skill") but there is no server maintenance that will fix these problems.