Call Of Duty Warzone 2.0 sparks busiest day ever for gamers on Virgin Media O2

The launch of the latest version of the battle royale game caused a massive surge on the provider’s network.

The launch of the latest version of Call Of Duty, Warzone, caused the busiest day ever for gaming on Virgin Media O2’s network (Dominic Lipinski/PA) (PA Archive)

The launch of the latest version of Call Of Duty’s online battle royale game, Warzone, caused the busiest day ever for gaming on Virgin Media O2’s network.

The operator said players preloading the game in the early hours of Wednesday morning, ahead of launch, caused a traffic spike of more than double the average at that time.

Data traffic was even a third higher than the most recent release of a full Call Of Duty console game – Modern Warfare II – which came out earlier this month.

According to Virgin Media O2, 138 petabytes of data were downloaded overall on Wednesday November 16 – the equivalent of streaming more than 41 billion songs – making it the busiest day ever on the network for gaming traffic.

It was also the second busiest day ever for all traffic on the company’s broadband network, only behind October 19 when five Premier League games were streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

“Gaming is continuing to drive record network spikes on our network proving just how popular online gaming is with our customers,” Jeanie York, Virgin Media O2 chief technology officer said.

“Our gigabit network, backed up by our market-leading Wi-Fi guarantee, is the perfect ally to keep gamers ahead of the game.”