GTA Online Crashes and Burns

Many of you I’m sure have spent a good part of the last 12 hours GTA Online has been available repeatedly holding down on your d-pad in an effort to connect to Rockstar’s servers and begin creating some online mayhem. Unfortunately for most people all they have seen is a cavalcade of the possible error screens.

By starting a solo or invite only game in GTA Online players are able to watch the introduction cutscene and make a character, but things quickly stop working when trying to find other players for the first race through Rockstar’s matchmaking service. At the time of writing even Rockstar Social Club’s website is down for the count and unresponsive.

While launch day congestion is standard for any popular online game, with Rockstar having an extra two weeks to calculate and organize servers to bear the load it’s a little saddening to have GTA Online entirely unplayable for almost everybody on launch day.

You can check Rockstar’s support site for live updates on the downtime as it continues. The latest thanking gamers for their patience and advising that that Rockstar are “continuing to look into these issues and will keep posting updates here to keep the Community informed.”

Of course while I never wanted this to happen I cannot say it was unexpected.

In the last two weeks of my GTA V experience only a few times has the Rockstar Social Club been working well enough that notifications of my friends exploits frequently appeared on the screen. Most of the time Social Club updates have been oddly absent, likely owing to the massive amount of people attempting to access the servers.

So now all we can do is wait and hope, as I’m sure Rockstar are feverishly attempting to add further server capability to their network to stem further bad press from the matter.