If the Overwatch 2 queue times have you down, you’re not the only one. The long-awaited sequel to Blizzard’s hero shooter was the victim of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack as soon as its servers went live, and Blizzard president Mike Ybarra said on Twitter that the attack is still taking place, over a full day after the game launched.
A DDoS attack involves one party directing inordinate volumes of traffic to a website or platform to intentionally disrupt its service. So if you try logging in for a match and see a message saying 30,000 players are ahead of you, that’s why. There probably aren’t that many players actually waiting in line at a given time, but until Blizzard resolves the DDoS attack, you’ll have a difficult time actually getting into the game.
Once you do successfully sign in, you may still face a number of issues. The attack is reportedly responsible for a bug that removes all existing skins players own from the original Overwatch – though not permanently – and for causing a number of connection issues. Matches may end suddenly, or you may lose connection to the server and have to start at the back of the queue again without warning.
Blizzard is working on resolving the DDoS attack, though provided no estimate for when the issue may be resolved.
If you’re using a pre-paid phone for your Blizzard account, it might not even be worth the wait until Blizzard sorts out that problem as well.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
