Bad Routing / Very high ping

Technical Support
1

Over the past week or so I’ve randomly had horrendous routing in my matches.

I usually never go above 60 ping anywhere in EU but for the past week or so my matches have randomly had anywhere between 260+ and 500+ latency round trip times. There is no packet loss or discernible symptoms outside of overwatch regarding bandwidth or dropped packets. There is also no packet loss in overwatch itself. Just comical round trip times; like my packets were taking an extra lap or two around the planet.

I’ve had it happen in both competitive and quickplay. I haven’t been able to replicate it in arcade or the firing range yet during my attempts at troubleshooting, though I don’t use them very frequently.

Things I’ve done troubleshooting wise; while or after this has happened in one or several back to back matches:

-Restart the game (Issue persisted)
-Flushed my DNS cache, restarted battle.net client and game (Issue persisted into next game I queued)
-Restarted my PC and got back into the same game in time (Issue persisted)
-Updated my router firmware, PC components drivers, network card drivers…
-Reset my router to factory settings
-Made sure my router isn’t running hot or under-performing in general
-Reset my fiber modem (I did this during every troubleshooting step revolving my router too)
-Connected directly to my fiber modem to my ethernet port (no router in between)
-Contacted my ISP to see if others had reported issues or if they could see anything wrong (they couldn’t see any service problems or otherwise related issues)
-Changed my upstream DNS provider (more than once, not that it should matter…)
-Checked if anything else on my pc is eating up my entire 500mbps fiber connection (Couldn’t find anything even using a fraction of it while the issues occurred)
-Closed every single other program on my pc (Problem persisted)

The latency problem only occurs in overwatch and seem completely random from game to game.
On any given day at varying times of day, I’ve been able to launch the game, play a few games in quickplay or competitive and then suddenly my ping will be multiplied by a factor of like 10 relative to the previous game in the next match. With nothing changing that I am aware of in between the matches, straight re-queue without even tabbing out.

The thing that is again noteworthy is that my connection will still be completely stable at the high ping the entire match, just comically consistently late packets.

From skimming the forums I don’t seem to be the only person experiencing this in the past week or so.
Seen people talk about seemingly similar odd issues in every region in the past week.
I just doubt ALL these people from like 4 different continents with all different ISPs happened to get bad routing in ONLY overwatch in the past week or so.

Happy to provide more info if guided on how I can help troubleshoot this further.

Country: Sweden
ISP: Bahnhof
Traceroute: Give me an address to ping!!

Update 21 April 2025:
Issues still persisting.
Had the issue happen at the start of a quickplay match that was hosted in NA (where my duo is from) around 12:20 CEST.
I usually have 115-130 ping to NA east (or central?) but this time I had over 260.
We verified my duo who usually gets 50 ping to east coast NA didn’t see anything unusual.
Because the problem seemed to stick for a little I tried restarting the game and playing through a VPN that also hosts in my city.
0 Issues with routing, immediately got better results and no ping issues.
I turned off the VPN and immediately got horrible routing again, while trying arcade skirmishing during queue.
All the testing after the first problem was identified was done solo queue so my duo wouldn’t further skew the results.

I have a few screenshots of network graphs but I will start with the skirmish game I just had (remove the spaces in the imgur URL):
https:// imgur. com/a/QBMGxtb
(Note that the network problem indicator is only present at the start of my matches and is NOT persistently present or reoccurring during the high ping games.
It appears for me during the start of matches I have good ping in too and then goes away like normal.)

Different competitive match from April 18th around 17:26 CEST
https:// imgur. com/Z27bs37

Update 04 May 2025:
This issue is still persistent for me on a frequently re-occurring basis and evidently to a bunch of other people too. Would be really cool if blizzard would at least start acknowledging this is an issue.

Only thing to add is that connecting through a VPN doesn’t seem to help anymore. I get horrible ping on both now but the bad routing remains persistent even through that, so I guess I’m out of luck on this one…

Update 18 May
Still get this on a regular basis. Really cool that there is complete radio silence from blizzard on this.

8 Likes
2

I play on NA and the exact same thing happens. Out of nowhere, 250+ ping games. My girlfriend was in the same game with 40 ping. WE LIVE IN THE SAME HOUSE! No downloads going, nothing taking bandwidth and I have 600 download/upload.

3

same here on EU. Went from very consistant 50 ping to 400-2500. It was completely fine last season

4

same here, US east.
I’ll play several games at 50 ping then randomly get one at 250-350. lasts all game.
Speedtest shows 4ms latency and 1000Mbps up and down

5

This started over 2 weeks ago, and Blizzard hasn’t addressed it yet.

6

Just wanted to say +1 on having this issue. It’s rare among the community but I’ve heard of a few people getting the same.

Hopefully enough people come forward so blizzard gives it some attention.

7

Same here from NL. For some reason, restarting my pc seems to fix the issue (happened 2 times now, so might’ve been luck), but I won’t know if I get the high latency until the game starts, and restarting at that point is a no-go of course.

8

Exactly the same for me in the UK. About a week ago the issues began. I cannot connet to any EU servers at all. I mostly get Brazil, Sydney, or Korea. Incredibly frustrating and seems to be happening all over with no fix.

I’ve done all the same steps as you and have tried multiple VPNs. Nothing helps.

9

Just dropping in to give my +1 ! I get sent to random servers, my main one ord1 is usually only playable when its not peak hours (if im lucky to get in), otherwise even if it seems stable it throws me out of the game. I need a vpn to have a better chance at stable gameplay which has not been a necessity for me the entire existence of OW2!! They need to fix this asap ><

10

I wonder if Blizzard is aware of this error. I wish they would get back to us on this. I have the same problem. After 1-2 hours my ping is skyrocketing

11

+1 here too. Started today for me, was playing with two friends and one match i fine then the next i have 160-200 ping but my friends where fine. This kept happening every other match.

12

Just here to add my voice to the chorus as well. UK (London) based, ISP is Virgin.

From a LOT of googling it sounds as though it is a routing issue after Blizzard moved some server IPs around after a recent DDOS, but I’ve not seen any official announcement about it.

14

Same thing here, has been happening for weeks.NA/PC/Battle.Net client. Full games in high ping not happening to others, and not a spike but ongoing for the duration of the game until restart. Multiple games fine and then randomly 250-400ms latency.

Just wanted to add my case to this to hopefully see it addressed

15

Same for me, I have had this issue for a few months but lately it’s becoming worse. US (SEA)

16

Also experiencing this. Some matches are fine at like 40 ms latency, others are 220 ms. Always connecting to the Chicago server as far as I can tell.

Very high (but extremely stable) latency during these games.

17

Happening right now. Finished a game with 50ms, only to join another with 600ms. Did blizzard still not respond 1+ month into this?

1 Like
18

I also have this issue, and recently received a season long ban because of all the disconnections it has caused.

Blizzard’s response to me was to ignore the technical issue and tell me that even if they found that none of the disconnects were my fault (which they weren’t), they still would not remove the ban.

19

Yes! Another +1 here. EU Server (located Switzerland).

I am always at 30 ping and yet in some stadium rounds… not all, but some. I am watching it bounce from 150ish to 200+ when the round is loading. It just goes up and down and never loads the round so I get booted. I can usually just rejoin, but never that round. The next round only.

I’ve also noticed the same with ONLY Thrones of Anubis in QP. EVERY time I get this map, I see the map loading screen and it just hangs there until I’m booted for inactivity. I can hear the menu “behind” it but I can’t do anything. No other QP maps just this one.

I stopped playing stadium because I didn’t want to be banned so moved to QP and found it with this one map.

I can play comp endlessly without issue. It’s not a me, a network or a console thing. I’ve played OW for years across two countries and NEVER experienced anything like this until the Stadium update.

20

I have a different issue but its in the same vein. it wasnt happening in season 16 until the last week during competitve drives. I will be able to play one or two games of stadium then all of a sudden I get packet loss jumping from 1% (which is already unplayable if anyone has had packetloss before) to literally 30% during the games and the strangest thing of all is that in one round of stadium I have this issue then the next 2 or 3 rounds it is completely gone and then it starts up again in the next round. so it is not an issue on my side because it only happens on specific overwatch servers. I do not have this issue with any other game I play at all, even other games with servers in amsterdam and the uk. in fact, I have never once had packetloss when playing a game for about 4 years now.

I do live in South Africa and in order to play on EU servers, I have to block my connection to the Saudi Arabia servers because that server is so dead that stadium queues during off and peak times are literally 20 minutes long across all ranks and all roles, it is unplayable for me. I did notice that this packetloss only exists when im actively blocking the saudi connection even though im playing on amsterdam servers, when I unblock the saudi connections and play on the amsterdam servers the connection is 100% fine.

I think they might be having routing issues with their servers currently and havent noticed yet because it seems to be very specific things happening. I have since bought a vpn (unfortunately I need to VPN to play this game because they dont give server select options like they used to) and the packetloss is still present from time to time but now its rarely. about 1 round in 5 games but its strange this is happening. I hope they fix it or are made aware of it

21

Just hoping if enough of us have it they will do something about it. its clearly a routing error and its on their side.