Yesterday, June 18, the Rockstar servers for Grand Theft Auto Online went down for PC, Playstation 4 and Playstation 3. Both the Xbox One and Xbox 360 servers remained active, but the server info indicators for the other four platforms all showed the dreaded universal sign of server issues, the small yellow triangle adorned with the ominous exclamation mark.
Before the comment section explodes with the more... competitive Xbox players' triumphant compositions, the Microsoft consoles also encountered issues with GTA Online during this period — namely, people could not load their save files. Sorry folks, no excuse to ignite the console war here too.
We've taken a look at the updated server status, and it seems that Rockstar has managed to solve the issue, and the GTA Online servers are once again functioning properly on all platforms.
Despite the heavy traffic (the game did sell well over 52 million copies, even divided between 5 platforms, that is an immense player base), the Rockstar servers have been generally stable. The last time they buckled under duress was when the Heists DLC was released for GTA Online back in March. While there were the occasional overloads or maintenance down times, players of GTA Online could enjoy the game with pretty much no interruption.
While the issue this time around was solved extremely quickly, and a single instance of a few hours of unexplained down time is hardly something to sound the klaxons about, it is a known fact that the player base of GTA Online is only ever growing. New players are jumping in on the fun on a daily basis, and despite the pricing debacle, the Steam Summer Sale caused a spike in new players recently.
GTA V, and, by extension, Online, have been massive hits with unprecedented sales figures. Do you think it's possible that Rockstar underestimated the traffic GTA Online will be seeing, and their servers can't handle the load, or do you think this was a one time occurrence?
