It seems no company can launch a game these days with out headlines proclaiming that the game is not doing well. The Division, the new, much hyped, MMORPG shooter, from Ubisoft has fallen prey to the problems of  so many other massive multiplayer games before it. It appears that the games servers collapsed under the weight of the good ole USA’s player base. In case you missed it (or were sleeping like me) The division launched on Australian midnight last night, allowing players world wide to play at that time.

Players who woke up expecting to be able to log in and get an early start on the game found themselves confronted by errors ‘Romeo’ and ‘Sierra’. Which seems to mean that the game client was unable to reach the servers. Ubisoft sent out this tweet at 2AM

2 hours ago, there was a Ubisoft services outage. This issue has now been resolved and players should be able to resume playing the game.

— Tom Clancy's The Division (@TheDivisionGame) March 8, 2016

Fortunatly service was restored by the time of that tweet. There is rampant speculation that the error was server overload, but it seems unlikely and a post on the official Ubisoft forums seems to point to  “Ubisoft Services Degradation” as the issue. Perhaps they simply underestimated the number of players that wanted to get in to the game. That seems odd considering that “More than 6.4 million players apparently participated in The Division Beta” according to Ubisoft themselves. It seems like they ought to have prepared for this, but perhaps it was simple underestimation of demand. Service is now restored, and players are happily killing the cleaners and ganking each other in the darkzone.