Warzone’s Season 3 update caused Virgin Media’s ‘biggest gaming traffic spike on record’

Wednesday was the second busiest day on record for Virgin’s network

The launch of Call of Duty Warzone Season 3 led to Virgin Media O2‘s “biggest gaming traffic spike on record”.

Warzone Season 3 released on Tuesday, April 26 at 5pm in the UK, resulting in Virgin Media’s busiest day of the year so far, and its second busiest of all time, on April 27.

According to Virgin Broadband, the only time its network has been busier was on December 28 last year, which it attributes to the Omicron wave of COVID-19 keeping people at home on the same day six Premier League football games were being streamed on Amazon Prime Video.

Between 4pm and midnight on April 27, the average Virgin Media customer consumed 12.1GB of data, which Virgin says is 29% more than the previous week.

During the evening peak period between 8pm and 10pm, traffic was also 11.9% higher than average and 23.8% higher than the previous week.

This isn’t the first time Virgin has identified Call of Duty as the instigator of record-breaking traffic on its service.

Last year the launch of Warzone Season 2 drove what was at the time its “busiest day on record”, with the average Virgin user downloading 20.77GB of data over the course of 24 hours.

The launch of Xbox Series X/S and Call of Duty updates in November 2020 also drove record broadband data usage for leading UK providers.

Warzone Season 3, which is named Classified Arms, includes a new point of interest, significant changes to several other areas of Caldera, a new Gulag and a fresh Contract, among other features.

The new point of interest is Dig Site. Featuring abandoned excavation machines and equipment, tents and massive skeletons, it’s located between Mine and Ruins.

Runway, Peak and Lagoon have also been updated ahead of the launch of Operation Monarch in May, when Godzilla and King Kong will be unleashed on Caldera.