I am sure it was just overloaded. A company as big as Apple was not able to keep their site up when iPad 3 was released couple months ago.
As for the Microsoft product. They actually do make very good products, including Windows7 and their server products. While it's not perfect, I just don't think there's anything better out there with all the feature and compatibility it provides.
I think it's about the time and the resource needed for a smooth operation.
Voting is VERY VERY tricky.
It fails almost every time even for organizations as big as governments, no body get it right. Don't expect TVB can get it right.
Apple server down, blizzard server down, activision server down, .... All these are the one of the most technological advance companies in the world. And you expect TVB to get it right?
What most companies don't realize (or the person who pays for the service) is that if they prepare to let 2 million people to log in at the same time, they have to assume 200 million connections (because of crazy amount of reconnects and retries). Let say the cost for prepare 2 million connection is 100k. Who will pay 100 times that for smooth service? TVB would say "Fcuk off".
There can be some very smart tricks here and there to reduce the amount of connections, but these requires lots of time to research and develop and it's different for each project.
I have some theories for voting system in the near future to make voting system possible and affordable. hint: cloud service.
The set up is grossly under power and can only handle 4000 TPS. It is more likely, everyone wanted to vote would be waiting in front of their computer for the poll to open. The load won't be spread evenly in the 10 minutes. Also the flood of requests may jam and crash the network before they can even get to the servers.