I had this issue earlier as well. The server my friends are on finally opened for a brief moment, and I attempted to create my character. The loading wheel in the bottom right hung around for about 20 minutes without any change in status after I had entered a name and was on the final step. Ultimately I had to force close the program, as it completely stopped responding. When I got back into the game, that character was gone, and no trace that I had even created it existed (also, the server was full again and unavailable to create a new character).