Unable to create your city at this time. Please claim a city again later

I had the same problem as everyone last night. I closed down the program, and then restarted it. This time, it came up with the tutorial as the only main menu option. After completing the tutorial, everything worked perfectly. So it almost appears that the tutorial loading on first run could be the real issue. I'm not sure if it's set to be complete before anyone can play a "normal" game, which would be causing the city creation problems.