Overwatch 2 DDoS attack – Blizzard’s shooter sequel slowed to snail’s pace

Overwatch 2 launched hours ago on October 4th, but already the game has run into issues. As with any launch it’s been blighted with errors, huge queue times, and other issues. But as confirmed by President of Blizzard Entertainment Mike Ybarra, Overwatch 2 is now under DDoS attack.

The DDOS attack has exacerbated already long queues, and meant the game is almost inaccessible for most. Worse than this, the lucky few who are able to get into the game, are routinely booted or playing on slow, laggy servers.

Overwatch 2's game director took to Twitter on October 5th to state that the game had been subject to a second DDoS attack.

A DDoS attack, or Distributed Denial of Service, is when a server is overloaded with two many requests from multiple, often thousands of sources. This causes the servers to lag, or automatically stop people from accessing the servers. This type of attack is now purportedly happening to Overwatch 2 servers.

As a result, an already tumultuous launch has been made even more difficult. Overwatch 2 has been flocked to by players, even those who had long given up on the franchise. The hype for a new game cannot be beat. And players are eager to get their hands on a new version of the game.

Per Ybarra’s tweets, Blizzard’s engineers are hard at work on a fix for the current DDOS attack. However, it’s often difficult to identify legitimate forms of traffic (such as players spamming the login queue to get into the game) versus illegitimate traffic (attacks on the server). Unfortunately this means it’s likely to get worse before it gets better, and Overwatch 2 players in for a long night of DDoS, queues, kicks, and lag.