The New York Times recently cited Webkinz and Club Penguin as the leaders of the kids' worlds craze -- so it's also no surprise that Newsday is reporting that the Webkinz site may be so popular, attracting so many users, that it's straining parent Ganz's technical capacity. According to Newsday, Webkinz has been experiencing outages over the recent weeks -- not coincidentally, holiday time, which suggests that many kids may have joined the Webkinz brigade, or bolstered their fuzzy forces, over Christmas. Ganz operations director Elaine Parson told Newsday that the site ran into "a programming issue that was unforeseen."

Newsday also spoke to "toy expert" Chris Byrne about the issues:

"It's not a conspiracy to rob children of the delight of playing with Webkinz," Byrne said. "I'm willing to bet the traffic has been way up in the past two days and inevitably when traffic spikes, you're at risk for technical problems."

In the meantime, Byrne said he was sure Webkinz customers were able to find other amusements. "They'll read a book," he said.