Overwatch 2 goes down for maintenance amid cyber-attack

Overwatch 2 has gone down for maintenance, and following that, suffered another cyber attack, making this a rough launch week for the game.

Overwatch 2 went down for maintenance this morning as widespread reports of the hero roster being locked for players started occurring. Afterwards, Blizzard’s servers experienced yet another DDOS attack.

The launch for Overwatch 2 has not gone well by most metrics.

While the game is undoubtedly popular and fun to play, the launch was marred by a previous DDOS attack and a flood of returning and new players all trying to get in at once, causing immense server strain and disconnections.

Alongside that, reports of previously unlocked content being unavailable ran wild — Overwatch 1 players were supposed to have their roster remain unlocked, however many returning players found their heroes locked due to a bug.

Additionally, there were players discovering that you could purchase items accidentally while using the in-game chat feature — a bug that has since been fixed.

Overwatch 2 hasn’t had a smooth launch, but it has been a popular one. Picture: Blizzard

Following reports of a hefty chunk of the roster being flat-out locked away from all players, Overwatch 2 went down for maintenance.

This bug followed an intentional lock of two characters, Bastion and Torbjorn, for having game-breaking issues.

In Bastion’s case, players could launch many more mortars than is normally allowed, which can kill some heroes in a single hit, while in Torbjorn’s case, an ability was not setting off a cooldown, allowing it to be used more often than intended.

Players would load into a match only to find about one-third of the roster inaccessible to them.

Naturally, this has sparked a heavy outcry on social media, with many attributing the bugs to the controversial battle pass system, which unlocks heroes via lengthy play or paying money instead of guaranteeing access as Overwatch 1 had.

After Blizzard took the servers down to fix the issue, they started to suffer yet another DDOS attack against their servers.

Despite these glaring issues, Overwatch 2 has had a pretty successful first week, with plenty of players logging in for the first time in a long while to see what new changes sprang up. Kiriko, the newest Support to the roster, is particularly well received due to her teleport and wall-climb abilities.

— written by Junior Miyai on behalf of GLHF