The interesting (if unsurprising) detail is that the housing reclamation timers failed to work properly. There had been just shy of 27 hours of combined downtime for Balmung since patch 3.1 was released and the servers came online. According to SE's own explanation, that meant none of the homes on Balmung should have been demolished until several hours into 12/26 (in North America). And yet they were demolished on that server almost 13 hours early during Christmas Day.

While I'm sure that was a relief for the people camping locations yesterday and waiting, the reality is the demolitions happened prematurely.