Overwatch 2 launch marred by DDOS attack

Overwatch 2 was hit with a DDOS attack during its opening hours. This caused massive queues and disconnect issues for many of its players.

Overwatch 2 launched today, but unfortunately the launch was marred by a combination of lots of players hopping into the game and a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack.

DDOS attacks are fairly common ways to interfere with popular game launches — a DDOS attack essentially floods a game’s servers with excessive data, increasing load times and in some cases, crashing the server(s) entirely.

Overwatch 2 is a “hero shooter”, where teams of five face off against each other and compete for objectives on a map. Players can pick from one of 35 heroes that slot into one of three roles — damage, tank or support — to win their games. Overwatch 2 opened its doors earlier today to some wide fanfare, with plenty of players hopping in to see all of the new changes.

However, they were greeted with a number of errors and long queue times, related to the aforementioned DDOS attack as well as the swarm of people trying to get in. Mike Ybarra, President of Blizzard, posted on Twitter that teams were working to “mitigate/manage” the issues.

Overwatch 2 features new heroes as well, such as Kiriko. Picture: Blizzard

As a result, players found themselves waiting for quite a long time to queue into Overwatch 2, with queues reaching as high as 10,000. There are also plenty of reports of skins and items not transferring over from Overwatch 1 for players, while others still report being unable to purchase items from the Shop.

Blizzard recently announced that it’s other megahit game, World of Warcraft, would see its newest expansion Dragonflight launch this November. We did a deep dive interview with the developers to talk about the new Dracthyr race and Dragonriding for you to read. If that’s not enough World of Warcraft for you, we also interviewed Blizzard about Wrath of the Lich King Classic as well.

In other news, torture apologist and former US President counsel Frances Townsend recently retired from Activision Blizzard but will remain on standby as counsel to Bobby Kotick and the Board of Directors.

Written by Junior Miyai on behalf of GLHF.