GTA 6 Is So Big That It’s Destroying Your Internet Connection
The first Grand Theft Auto traffic jam happened before anybody could jack a car. No pileup on a Vice City freeway. No genius in a stolen supercar trying to take an exit at 180 mph. Just a lot of people hitting download and at least one internet provider having a very bad day.
GTA 6 Already Has A Five-Star Wanted Level
Grand Theft Auto 6 launches November 19 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, but the digital preload is already out there taking up to 212 GB, depending on the console. If your storage is packed, get ready to have a brutally honest conversation with the games you swear you’re going to finish someday.
Storage was only the first casualty. In the UK, internet provider YouFibre told customers that demand for GTA 6 downloads had caused a capacity issue on its network and reduced download speeds, according to Forbes. Imagine paying for fast internet, sitting down to watch something, and finding out your connection is stuck behind a convoy of people downloading a game about stealing cars. The kid next door hasn’t even made it out of the loading screen and he’s already a menace to the neighborhood.
Virgin Media O2 logged its busiest broadband day, blowing past the daily record set by a major Fortnite update. The GTA rush also topped the previous evening peak from an Arsenal Champions League match. If you’re keeping score, that’s one game that nobody could play beating a game people were playing and a match people were actually watching.
Over in Ireland, the Internet Neutral Exchange handled 12.53 petabytes of traffic in a day, up from a six-month daily average of 9.53 petabytes, according to JOE.ie. That’s about 31 percent more data than usual. The exchange also set a peak traffic record and pointed to the GTA preload as the likely reason. There’s something deeply funny about a game famous for letting you ignore traffic laws producing the digital equivalent of everybody trying to merge onto the same highway at once.
The GTA 6 Preload Was Supposed To Ease Traffic
The funny part is that the early download was supposed to make launch night smoother. The preload rolled out more than a week ahead of release, giving players time to grab the files and giving networks a chance to spread the load. It’s the internet equivalent of telling everybody to leave early for a race weekend. Great plan until a ridiculous number of people decide that “early” means the exact same hour.
At a steady 50 Mbps, a 212 GB download takes about nine and a half hours in ideal conditions. Drop to 10 Mbps and you’re looking at more than 47 hours. That’s two nights of watching a progress bar inch forward while your group chat asks if you’re ready yet. And if you bought a physical code-in-box edition, you’re in that download line too once you redeem the code. You just got a box to look at while you wait.
There’s a fair question buried in all this. When a single game can put enough strain on a provider’s network to slow down people who never bought it, how much extra capacity should that provider have ready for a launch this big? You can already picture the argument in the comments. Half the room will blame Rockstar for the monster file. The other half will ask why their fiber connection tapped out before the game even unlocked.
Come November 19, the first thing plenty of car people will do is find something quick, crank the radio and see how long they can keep it out of a guardrail. Until then, the only thing some of us are redlining is the router.
Preload size and release timing are from VGC and AP. The reported traffic figures and slowdown are from JOE.ie, Moneycontrol and Forbes. Download times are calculated at steady speeds.
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