If you’ve been having trouble getting into Overwatch 2 on launch, you’re not alone. Blizzard president Mike Ybarra announced on Twitter that the Overwatch 2 servers are currently undergoing a “mass” distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which typically occurs when something is maliciously flooded with traffic to prevent others from connecting. This is likely the main culprit for the connection issues plaguing anyone who’s trying to log into the game.
Overwatch 2 just launched today, and people have been reporting obscenely long wait times, with some sitting behind tens of thousands of players. There have been other launch issues, such as missing cosmetics, missing match histories, and buggy cameras. Weird errors are normal for a massive live service game launch. But someone trying to inflict a cyberattack on Overwatch 2 is not quite so common.
The servers will likely be back soon. Probably. We just don’t have an exact ETA on that. Kotaku reached out to Blizzard about when the servers will be back to full capacity but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Read More: Be Prepared For These 7 Big Overwatch 2 Gameplay Changes
Blizzard’s new free-to-play shooter is intended as a complete replacement for the original Overwatch, which just saw its servers go offline yesterday after six years. That means you can’t just hop into Overwatch while you wait for the DDoS attack to be over, unfortunately. Critics who pre-screened Overwatch 2 seemed sold on the actual gameplay, but felt a little cold on the gated live service progression for unlocking characters. People were already convinced that Overwatch 2 is barely more than an update for a perfectly serviceable competitive game, so the free-to-play shift felt like one of the bigger changes was a huge bummer to many fans.
Anyway, I hope you can at least get your place in line back once Blizzard gets the servers back under control.
Update 10/5/22 at 11:29 P.M. E.T.: In a new blog post, Blizzard has addressed the ongoing connectivity issues plaguing the new free-to-play hero shooter. The developer says that while it is working on, and has improved, some of the conditions, player should still expect a wait. The difference is that fans won’t be seeing two queues happen after one another. Unfortunately, trying to fix this at all also puts additional strain on the game servers, so the issue will continue for the foreseeable future. Blizzard writes:
Login queues, server crashes, and stability problems are intertwined, so we’ll talk about them together. Players may have been seeing their queue numbers jumping around, going from a small number to a larger number. This is due to there being two queues for players—one through Battle.net, then one through the game itself. This process is usually invisible to players, but was being seen in real time. We have made changes to simplify the queuing process, so players should now only be experiencing the one queue before entering the game.
There are several areas where we’re working to improve stability. Today we’ve patched a server that is critical to the login experience, and this change has increased login reliability. Beyond queues, we’re in progress with another server update that will reduce the occurrences of players being disconnected once they’re already in game.
Finally, the player database is being overloaded, which cascades and causes a backup in the login system, which eventually leads to some people being dropped out of queues or being unable to log in at all.
We’re continuing to add nodes to ease the pressure on the player database. The process of adding nodes requires replication of data, which inherently adds pressure to an already stressed system, so we’re doing it slowly to not cause any further disruption as devs and engineers work through separate issues. We are also currently throttling queues in order to protect the player database as much as we can while we scale—this feels bad in the short-term, but once it’s done, will greatly improve the experience for players across multiple fronts moving forward.
Update 10/5/22 at 10:00 A.M. E.T.: The game director of Overwatch 2 says that the game has now suffered a second DDoS attack. There is still no word on when the servers will be back to normal functionality.