The Loadout Blog

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By Drew Bryant
October 6, 2022, theloadoutblog.com

On Tuesday, Blizzard’s long awaited hero shooter Overwatch 2 released for PC. The long awaited release of the hero shooter was marred by connectivity issues due to an ongoing mass DDos attack on its servers on launch day. A distributed denial of service or DDos attack, typically happens when something is maliciously flooded with traffic to prevent others from connecting. This attack on Overwatch 2 servers is the main culprit causing connection issues for anyone trying to login and play.

On launch day Overwatch 2 was plagued with reports of ridiculously long wait times, with some waiting behind tens of thousands of players in queue. The launch of Overwatch 2 was also witnessed issues with such things as buggy cameras, missing match histories, or missing character cosmetics.

During this DDos attack the Overwatch team has been working diligently to correct the error and get gamers back online playing Overwatch 2. The new hero shooter by Blizzard is the sequel to the popular original Overwatch game, which was a massive success for the company. This DDoS attack forced Blizzard and the Overwatch team to take servers offline for the first time in six years. Unfortunately, no one can play Overwatch until this issue is resolved. Now, for players it is a waiting game to see when servers will be back online.

On Wednesday morning, Blizzard released a new blog post addressing the ongoing connectivity issues with Overwatch 2. The developer announced they are diligently working on the problem and has improved, some of the conditions, player should still expect a wait. The difference is that players won’t be seeing two different queues happening back to back. This temporary fix put additional strain on the game servers, so the longer connection times will still be an issue.

Below, is a portion of the blog post from Blizzard concerning the DDos attack on Overwatch 2.

Blog Post On DDoS Attack

Hello, heroes. Yesterday was an exciting day for the Overwatch team—a day that we know you have been looking forward to for a long time. While millions of people have been enjoying the game, the launch has not met your, or our, expectations.

First, we want to apologize to our players. We expected the launch of Overwatch 2 to go smoothly. We hold ourselves to a higher standard and we are working hard to resolve the issues you are experiencing.

We want to provide transparency on the issues, fixes we have made so far, and give you all insight as to how we’re moving forward.

Queue Issues, Server Crashes, and Stability

We have addressed some issues and are in the process of addressing others, but players should still expect to see queues.

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.

The Second DDoS Attack

After an DDoS attack kept tens of thousands of players offline on launch day on Wednesday Overwatch 2 witnessed another DDoS attack. This attack is now keeping tens of thousands of players offline for the second day. The new attack occurred Wednesday morning, less than 8 hours after the original attack occurred. This issue is contributing to the game’s long queue size and horrendous wait times.

On Wednesday, Overwatch 2 developer Aaron Keller announced an second DDoS attack on Twitter. He wrote, “We’re steadily making progress on server issues and stability, as well as working through a second DDoS attack,” He wrote. “We’re all hands on deck and will continue to work throughout the night. Thank you for your patience — we’ll share more info as it becomes available.” As, right now there is no word from Blizzard or the Overwatch 2 team when servers will be completely functional again.

Stay tuned for more developments on this story.

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