Overwatch 2 Launches, Immediately Suffers DDoS Attack

Overwatch 2 has officially released, but the celebration has been disrupted by an immediate and unfortunate DDoS attack. The release of Overwatch 2 is a pretty interesting one aside from the current chaos. The sequel has essentially replaced the original game. Blizzard shut down the original Overwatch earlier this week in preparation of migrating everyone over to Overwatch 2. For any other game, this would probably be a pretty controversial move, but this sequel is a refined and evolved version of its predecessor and it has one great perk: it's free! No one needs to drop $60 to play the sequel, so it makes it easier to convince players to move away from the original and not have a divided player base.

However, today's release of Overwatch 2 has resulted in some troubles. Upon the game releasing, the servers were immediately hammered, preventing the vast majority of players from getting into the game. Queues began to form with numbers as high as 40,000 players waiting to get into the game. While server issues may have been anticipated by some due to the wide appeal of Overwatch and the fact that anyone can play it since it's free-to-play, the server issues aren't just a result of a lot of eager players. Blizzard President Mike Ybarra confirmed on Twitter that Overwatch 2 is experiencing a DDoS attack, which is essentially when someone overloads servers by flooding them with traffic and requests. It can cause everything to lock up if it becomes overwhelming and the servers can't process all of it. Blizzard is working to fix the matter, but it's unclear when the matter will be resolved.

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

Overwatch 2 is one of the biggest releases of the fall and kicks off a huge month for Activision. The publisher will bookend October with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, a game that's expected to be even bigger in terms of sales when it releases. As of right now, it remains to be seen if Infinity Ward is prepared for the onslaught of fans that are going to purchase the game.

Overwatch 2 is out now on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC. Have you been able to get into any matches of Overwatch 2 yet? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @Cade_Onder.