Enlarge / Artist's conception of Blizzard fighting off DDoS attackers.

When a highly anticipated online game launches, unforeseen server capacity issues and long entry queues are nothing out of the ordinary. In the case of this week's Overwatch 2 early access launch, though, the usual crowding problems are apparently being exacerbated by coordinated distributed denial of service attacks.

On Tuesday evening, Blizzard President Mike Ybarra issued a generic tweet warning that "Teams are working hard on server issues with Overwatch 2 ." Less than an hour later, though, he followed up with some more worrying specifics. "Unfortunately we are experiencing a mass DDoS attack on our servers," he said. "Teams are working hard to mitigate/manage. This is causing a lot of drop/connection issues."

Overnight, Overwatch 2 Game Director Aaron Keller posted an update saying that "we’re steadily making progress on server issues and stability, as well as working through a second DDoS attack. 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."