The launch of Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 created the busiest day associated with gaming on one of the UK’s largest broadband providers’ networks.
Virgin Media O2 has just over 20% of the UK broadband market and the company revealed that Warzone 2.0 surpassed the recent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II update by 33% and beat its predecessor CoD: Warzone by 76%.
While the latest version of Call of Duty’s battle royale mode was made available to preload from Monday 14 November, Virgin Media O2 said that the spike began in the early hours of Wednesday 16 November as the game launched.
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Virgin Media O2 reported that usage of the broadband network continued to spike, with traffic more than doubling between 3am and 8am compared to the average Wednesday. A massive 138 petabytes of gaming data was downloaded on Virgin Media O2’s network over the 24-hour period. Downstream traffic peaked at 21 terabits per second (Tbps).
Incredible Context
As well as holding the gaming record, Wednesday’s Warzone 2.0-fueled download fest made it the second busiest day in the history of Virgin Media O2’s broadband network. Incredibly, the only event to top Warzone 2.0‘s launch download rush was when Amazon Prime Video simultaneously streamed five live Premier League games on October 19.
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Jeanie York, CTO at Virgin Media O2, said: “Gaming is continuing to drive record network spikes on our network, proving just how popular online gaming is with our customers.”
Virgin Media O2’s previous biggest gaming traffic spike occurred in April 2022 during Warzone Season 3 and Modern Warfare updates.