As a result people just dialed up for long periods of time and made lines busy.
It had a second effect - it was busy so often, that once you dialed in it was in your best interest not to dial out...because who knows when you could get back in. Thus the congestion intensified.
On top of that, there were programs like A-O-Hell which let people circumvent payment (and it seemed AOL liked it because who knows what metrics were lifted as a result). So you had even more users on the system, again with no incentive to use the system less.
Looked up AOHell on Wikipedia and landed on this interesting tidbit:
>Most notably, the program included a function for stealing the passwords of America Online users and, according to its creator, contains the first recorded mention of the term "phishing"
That lasted for about a year, until one day my family got a visit from the local police and some government spooks who wanted to know “how did you get these account details?”
Dad was furious. Wouldn’t let me around a computer until high school came along.
It was down for a couple hours per day almost every single day during the few years when they were in hyper growth. But the actual service itself was pretty great when it worked.