The account creation process is completely automated, and new requests are added to a processing queue. There are a lot of new accounts created on the Free Hosting plan (it goes without saying that "free" is a pretty attractive price point for a lot of people) so even at the best of times there is usually a waiting period before a new account is created (up to 24 hours).
However, there are periods (such as we have had recently) when the servers require maintenance and occasional downtime for one reason or another. When that happens, the processing queue needs to be paused, and the backlog of pending requests has to be processed before new requests are handled. I know -- nobody likes to be at the end of a very long line-up, but it's impossible to put everybody at the front of the line. Please be patient -- your request is still in the queue, and your account will be created when it gets to the front of the queue.