Amidst war, Stalker 2 breaks Ukraine’s internet as gamers rush to play new survival game

GSC Game World’s Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is an incredibly popular survival game. Made by a Ukranian development team, the game has been crafted with immense love for the country. Despite being in the midst of a war, the new video game launch serverely affected two internet providers in the nation.

Stalker 2 breaks Ukraine’s internet

While Stalker 2 has launched with broken AI mechanics, a fair number of bugs and missing features, it’s still a really fun survival game. With aggressive pre-launch optimisation to be blamed on its rocky release, GSC Game World has promised to fix a lot of the game’s problems.

However, for gamers still living in Ukraine amidst its ongoing war, those issues didn’t affect the game’s popularity at all. On release, gamers living in Ukraine were using so much bandwidth to download the 100GB-plus title that the entire region suffered as a result.

Via internet-focused website ITC, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl took down Tenet and Triolan, two Ukrainian internet providers.

“Due to the massive download of the long-awaited Stalker 2 game in multi-threaded mode, our partners’ external backbone channels are currently experiencing overload,” Tenet internet told its subscribers. “All subscribers may be affected by the decrease in Internet access speed. Unfortunately, the problem is beyond our direct influence”

Triolan also backed this up in a message to customers, citing slow internet speeds and outages were caused by an “increased load on the channels due to the massive interest in the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R”.

For citizens still living and working in country, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl has been a breath of fresh air. As Russia continues to attempt to force its way onto the land, the new video game is a sign of Ukraine’s un-resting strength. (Just check out the awesome Making Of documentary right here.)

For more news on the new survival game, read about the modders attempting to restore the game’s broken A-Life system or the mod that brings some added parkour actions to the game.