The online server for Activision Blizzard PC games, Battle.net, is currently down, likely because of too many players at once. This is an extremely unfortunate time for anyone's online servers to take a hit, especially since more people than ever before are at home playing games thanks to forced isolation and social distancing suggested by multiple country governments due to the current spread of COVID-19 coronavirus.
This isn't the only large online video game system to go offline recently, as Xbox Live was down just the other day and even Nintendo's online services stopped working recently. Video game companies are likely doing their best to keep up with player demand, but with more and more people pulling on their servers in all directions it's no surprise a game with a new player base as big as Call of Duty: Warzone's fifteen million could cause servers to crash.
Right now, according to Battle.net's own website monitoring system, nearly 40,000 players have reported issues with logging in in the past half hour. While there is no clear indication on why this is currently happening, players can likely assume it's due to an increased amount of traffic, something which has been reported as continually steadily growing in the past few days on both Steam and Xbox servers, and likely others as well. This isn't even the first time Battle.net has gone down this month, as a similar interruption in service happened only last week.
As the coronavirus continues to spread across the world, it's likely that even more people will attempt to distract themselves from boredom by playing video games, and online games in particular allow for a level of person-to-person connectivity that many will begin to miss should they be unlucky enough to be placed under quarantine for a period of weeks. While developers and programmers will be under the same amount of stress as everyone else, they also have the ability to offer a unique way of coping with these issues... provided the servers stay online.
Unfortunately, it's hard to know just how well the current infrastructure is. Even before the big increase across the board in player numbers, EA servers went down a lot in February 2020, and the constant addition of more players and more games to support is likely something which becomes very hard for some companies to manage. Hopefully, Battle.net will return online soon, and everyone should cross their fingers that sustained coronavirus quarantines won't also cause the delay of people playing online Activision Blizzard games.
Source: Battle.net