If slots are released at random times during the day its much fairer than doing it at midnight and then putting people in queues. The media should never have released this knowledge and told people to log on at midnight.
This clumsy tactic has caused a lot of bad feeling with people who get onto the site first and then are thrown into a queue behind people who just logged on.
There is a principle of "first come first served" that is understood to be the fairest way of getting access to a scarce resource. Now you have to queue outside the supermarket. Fair enough. Some people will make a special effort to arrive before the doors open so they will get in first because they were waiting longest.
Imagine standing in a queue outside Tesco waiting for the doors to open. Then they open the doors but don't let you inside. They tell you that you have to continue to queue for 10 or 15 minutes more while other folks who never queued are walking in straight from the street. Or you get into the store, start to fill your cart, and a security guard come up and tells you that you have to now go outside and queue again!
This would cause a riot and rightly so.
But its equivalent to the clumsy way in which people on the site already shopping are being thrown into a queue as the result of poorly designed software. The message says "there is a queue to shop on our site" But I am already ON your site!
The only way to prevent this and the site being clogged up is to release slots at random times in the day. Then anyone has a chance of getting them.