Screenshot: Blizzard Entertainment
If you’ve had trouble getting into Overwatch 2 at launch, you’re not alone. Blizzard president Mike Ybarra announced on Twitter that the Overwatch 2 servers are currently undergoing a “massive” distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which usually occurs when something malicious is flooded with traffic to prevent others from connecting. This is probably the main culprit for the connectivity issues that plague anyone trying to log into the game.
Overwatch 2 just launched today and people are reporting obscenely long wait times, with some behind tens of thousands of players. There have been other launch issues such as missing cosmetics, missing match histories, and cameras with bugs. Strange errors are normal for a massive live service game launch. But someone trying to carry out a cyber attack on Overwatch 2 is not that common.
The servers will probably be back soon. Probably. We just don’t have an exact ETA on that. Kotaku contacted Blizzard about when the servers will be back to full capacity, but received no response at the time of publication.
Read more: Get ready for these 7 big Overwatch 2 gameplay changes
Blizzard’s new free-to-play shooter is intended to be a full replacement for the original Overwatch, which saw its servers go offline yesterday after six years. That means, unfortunately, you can’t just jump into Overwatch while waiting for the DDoS attack to pass. Critics who pre-screened Overwatch 2 seemed sold on the actual gameplay, but felt a little cold about the gated live service progression for unlocking characters. People were already convinced that Overwatch 2 is little more than an update to a perfectly maintained competitive game, so the free-to-play shift as one of the bigger changes felt like a huge disappointment to many fans.
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Anyway, I hope you can at least get your place back in line once Blizzard gets the servers back under control.
Update 10/22/22 at 11:29 PMET: In a new blog post, Blizzard addressed the ongoing connectivity issues plaguing the new free-to-play hero shooter. The developer says that while it is working on and improving some conditions, the player should still expect a wait. The difference is that fans won’t see two queues happening in a row. Unfortunately, trying to fix this also puts additional strain on the game servers, so the problem will persist for the foreseeable future. Blizzard writes:
Login queues, server crashes, and stability issues are intertwined, so we’ll talk about it together. Players may have seen their queue numbers jump around, from a small number to a larger number. This is because there are two queues for players: one via Battle.net and one via the game itself. This process is usually invisible to players, but was seen in real time. We’ve made changes to simplify the queuing process, so players should now experience just that one queue before entering the game.
There are several areas where we are working to improve stability. Today we patched a server that is essential to the login experience, and this change has increased login reliability. In addition to queues, we’re working on a new server update that will reduce the frequency of disconnects from players when they’re already in the game.
Finally, the player database gets overloaded, causing a cascade and backup in the login system, which ultimately leads to some people dropping out of the queues or not being able to login at all.
We continue to add nodes to ease the strain on the player database. The process of adding nodes requires data replication, which inherently adds pressure to an already stressed system, so we’re taking it slow so as not to cause further disruption as developers and engineers solve separate issues. We’re also currently limiting queues to protect the player database as much as possible as we scale – this feels bad in the short term, but once it’s done it will greatly improve the player experience on multiple fronts.
Update 10/22/22 at 10:00 AMET: Overwatch 2’s game director says the game has now suffered a second DDoS attack. There is still no word on when the servers will return to normal operation.