Stadia turns into Night City as service sees its first widespread outage

Google’s Cyberpunk 2077 hardware giveaway was apparently so popular that they broke the internet and had to end it early. In addition to Gmail and other Google services experiencing severe outages over the past few days, Stadia itself just turned into Night City as it went dark for many due to a widespread service issue in the United States and Europe. At about 11:00 a.m. PT, users began to report that games like Human Fall Flat, Dead by Daylight, and, of course, Cyberpunk, were stuck on loading screens, and in some instances, the games wouldn’t even start!

The outage lasted for around two hours before the service fully came back online. As you can see from the DownDetector map, Europe experienced most of the issues. The reason that Google’s services went down this week was due to storage quotas problems and we wouldn’t be surprised if Cyberpunk were to blame – at least on Stadia’s end.

It’s been the most highly anticipated game across all platforms and it’s the very title that introduced new players to Stadia this week and made them believers in what Google has to offer. In fact, with the troves of endorsements that the service has been receiving thanks to how Cyberpunk plays on it compared to current-gen consoles, I don’t think that Google had anticipated the rapid influx of users. Either way, I blame Lew for all the extra traffic!

Are you worried that placing the future of gaming into the cloud could be an issue? Is this the first of many outages that we’ll see with Stadia or do you feel that Google will compensate for the extra gamers and prepare better for a situation like this next time? Being that cloud gaming is just getting its feet, we’re bound to experience a few bumps along the road to its mainstream acceptance, so I don’t foresee this being a big deal and I believe that if anyone can get in front of this, it’s Google.