Overwatch 2 is Down Too
Overwatch 2 is facing a rocky start. The game only just launched, with the original Overwatch being taken offline in the process. Blizzard clearly wanted to bring everyone into the fold, but some players are having trouble reaching the finish line. It’s not their fault though – Overwatch 2 servers are being hit with a DDOS attack as we speak.
DDOS – or “distributed denial of service” – is a funky little computer technique that essentially kills servers dead. There’s a lot of interesting facts here, but for our purposes, all you need to know is that someone, somewhere, is sending a lot of malicious data to Blizzard’s servers, overwhelming them. They’ll likely stay that way until Blizzard comes up with a fix, or the attacker chooses mercy.
Blizzard has released a statement on the issue, via twitter.
Unfortunately we are experiencing a mass DDoS attack on our servers. Teams are working hard to mitigate/manage. This is causing a lot of drop/connection issues. https://t.co/4GwrfHEiBE
— Mike Ybarra (@Qwik) October 4, 2022
Interestingly, the attack doesn’t seem to be having a universal impact. Some players are having no trouble, but others are practically locked out of the game. And with no Overwatch 1 to go back to, they’re fairly upset.
This is all fan-speculation, but some trends have emerged. First, console players seem to be bearing the worst of it. Second, there’s a general trend of players who’ve linked their console account to their Battle.net account. Whether this information hold the root cause or not, though, only time can tell.
Needless to day, Blizzard is none too happy about this turn of events. You can bet they’ll be chipping away at this problem as best they can – after all, you can’t sell Battle Passes to locked-out players.