With the Covid-19 lockdowns, partial lockdowns as well as social distancing in effect throughout the globe, it is not surprising that many are turning to video games as a form of entertainment.

While it is exciting to see more people jump on the gaming bandwagon, it does come with one downside: popular gaming platforms are being overloaded to the point of outage.

Currently, Blizzard servers are offline and have been crashing quite frequently these past few days. The company has taken to Twitter, mentioning that there is an issue with their authentication servers which has resulted in failed or slow login attempts.

We're currently investigating an issue affecting our authentication servers, which may result in failed or slow login attempts. — Blizzard CS - The Americas (@BlizzardCS) March 18, 2020

It seems that players are placed into queues while logging on and found themselves kicked out of the game once they hit the title screen.

Players from all Blizzard games such as Call of Duty, Overwatch, World of Warcraft and more have all reported being kicked out of their games. Over in Downdetector, Blizzard.net currently has over 23,000 down reports.

Over on the Nintendo side, the Nintendo Switch Online service was down for a whopping nine hours. However, it seems like the issue only affected those in the UK and US only (phew!).

Unfortunately, we're having some issues with our network services. We're looking to rectify the situation as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience. https://t.co/O9u3MXDZG6 — Nintendo of Europe (@NintendoEurope) March 17, 2020

Last Sunday, Xbox Live was down for over two hours, resulting in many players being unable to play their favourite multiplayer games.

With more people being stuck indoors, it isn’t surprising that these popular gaming platforms are suddenly overloaded. Even Discord was facing difficulties trying to accommodate the many users that have clamoured to use their popular service for not just gaming but also work calls and even remote classes.