Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 Hit With Cyberattack at Launch

Activision Blizzard Inc. was hit with a cyberattack on Tuesday, causing wide-scale connectivity issues during the launch of its hotly anticipated Overwatch 2 video game.

Mike Ybarra, president of Activision subsidiary Blizzard Entertainment, tweeted that the company was experiencing “a mass DDoS attack” on its servers Tuesday afternoon. Distributed-denial-of-service attacks, known as DDoS, are when traffic is directed at an organization’s servers that support a website, effectively knocking it offline.

The launch of Overwatch 2 already had long queue times for players waiting to get a chance to play the new game. It had been six years since the original, highly acclaimed Overwatch first came out and the sequel is one of Activision’s flagship game launches this year.

Activision Blizzard didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Even before the attack, players complained on Twitter of connectivity issues. Earlier in the day, Ybarra had tweeted that teams were working on server issues and were “humbled by the excitement of players.”

However, anticipation of the launch was clouded Monday when the National Labor Relations Board found that the company withheld raises for some of its staff for campaigning to form a union, according to the Washington Post.

Microsoft Corp. announced in January that it had agreed to buy the video game publisher in a deal valued at almost $69 billion. The software giant is facing regulatory scrutiny over concerns the acquisition could hamper competition.