On the maintenance issue, only Bungie was fastidious and anal enough to maintain all of their services and keep a watchful eye on any of the players within those services.
Failure to Elite
To be fair Call of Duty: Elite is a brilliant idea, and it has the potential to become very beneficial to both new and veteran gamers. However it seems that potential is being squandered on quick fixes, and unethical maneuvering.
Call of Duty: Elite has four major divisions: Career, Connect, Compete, and Improve, of which only Career and Improve perform in the manner that they were advertised. However even these features are not without their flaws, and these flaws are only magnified when the whole system is found to be routinely inaccessible.
Most of the disdain for Call of Duty: Elite comes from its inability to successfully provide its two most hyped features. Clan operations/challenges, and competition operations. Clan Operations didn't make an appearance on Call of Duty: Elite until 3 months after the service officially launched (7 months if we include when the beta was released). When it did appear four operations were listed, but only three were carried out. The third clan operation was then retroactively canceled two days after it took place. The remaining two clan operations took two weeks to review before any awards were handed out. Clan operations has yet to return to the Call of Duty: Elite service.
Competition operations, on the other hand, has been available quite regularly. It is the monitoring of these operations that provides most of the problems. Several competition operations have been retroactively canceled due to the developers inability to monitor/prevent cheaters. Other competition operations are delisted just prior to the event happening, or during the event, and are then attributed to maintenance errors.
Despite all of this, there are some benefits to subscribing to Call of Duty: Elite. For starters (and most importantly) you receive early, and "free" access to all the DLC. You are able to access Call of Duty: Elite T.V. In addition you have three times the regular user's storage for match replays, and two times the length for video exporting. Finally you get access to unique titles/emblems/themes, and clan titles/emblems.
Call of Duty: Elite was a fantastic premise that was poorly executed, and even more poorly maintained.