‘Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare’ And ‘Warzone’ Down? Servers Experiencing Issues
by Dave Thier
Update: 2/:11 Eastern: The official support page lists an outage again.
Update: 1:30 PM Eastern: The official support page no longer lists connection problems.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and the free-to-play Warzone are experiencing connectivity issues, it would seem. Players are reporting server problems that are making them unable to play, and Down Detector shows a large spike of complaints at around 12:00 PM eastern time following a smaller spike this morning.
Activision has acknowledged the issue and says that it is working on a fix. The official status page currently lists an outage across all platforms: PSN, Xbox Live, Battle.net, Nintendo and Steam. When I personally tried to access the game, I initially got a server maintenance message and was placed into a queue. When the projected wait time finished, however, I just got a message saying that the game was unavailable.
With this and other outages over the past few months, we can assume that at least part of the problem relates to dramatically increased traffic for all manner of online services thanks to stay-at-home orders, school closures and the broader network of restrictions put in place to stem the tide of COVID-19. More people are at home playing video games than ever, and Call of Duty, which released Warzone towards the beginning of the crisis, has seen a massive increase in interest in both the free-to-play and paid versions of the game. While we can’t say for sure that this is why the game has been having connectivity issues, it’s best to give these developers some grace in this immensely challenging times.
Hopefully we’ll get back to it soon. Call of Duty is currently wrapping up its third season, with developments in Warzone that point to an upcoming announcement for this year’s mainline installment, likely a Cold War-themed Black Ops title. Keep checking the official status page for word on when things are recovering, as usualy the developer doesn’t update that until problems are safely in the rear view.