Following an announcement that users could get the Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) for free, Epic Games store suffered a crash. Users trying to visit the store, no doubt, to get their hands on the free merchandise began seeing error messages.
Epic Game Store is a digital curated gaming market place for Epic Games, a US gaming company. They are the makers of the popular game, Fortnite.
Since the coronavirus pandemic has made social distancing a compulsory facet of life, many who can, are staying at home. Thus, they are turning to virtual sources of entertainment, such as games. Epic Games has been seeing a huge surge of players in recent times as well. In its online store, the company has been offering discounted sales as well.
However, as it has become its tradition, Epic Games releases some of its game titles for free. Usually, this will be provided within a short window to get as much activity as possible. However, the company likely did not envisage the strain its latest decision will have on its servers.
Epic Games announced that players could get the seven-year-old version of the Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) for free. It said this on 14th May and set the closing date for 21st May. The result was a virtual stampede unlike any the company had ever seen.
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Not long after, people started having problems connecting to the game’s server. Queries started surfacing online about what was wrong with Epic Games’ servers after the crash. The company finally came forward to acknowledge the issue. It said in a post on its Twitter page:
We are currently experiencing high traffic on the Epic Games Store.
We are aware that users may be encountering slow loading times, 500 errors, or launcher crashing at this time and we are actively working to scale. We’ll provide an update as soon as we can.
— Epic Games Store (@EpicGames) May 14, 2020
The website is finally back running as of this morning and Epic promised to continue to monitor the situation in another statement. This is an example of how a surge in internet activities can cause problems for servers.
Recently, we have seen reports from Facebook and Netflix about reducing the quality of streams to prevent this from happening.
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