Listen! You hear that? The guns have stopped. The shells aren’t falling. There’s not a grenade explosion to be heard! Sadly this isn’t the beginning of a new era of world peace, but rather the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III servers going down. This is, to say the least, something of a big deal in gaming. Each year’s Call of Duty sells like gangbusters and even the infamously lackluster Modern Warfare III campaign hasn’t stopped tens of millions of gamers swarming to its online modes.
So, what’s going on right now? As per r/CallOfDuty players are currently logging into their profiles to find they’ve been reset to level 1, that their battle pass won’t display, and that all their progression and stats have been erased. Presumably, there is some issue retrieving the correct player information from the servers, so it’s returning a default. On top of that, there are bizarre error notices appearing, such as “Reason: MINOT -HAWTHORNE”. It appears that some players can get into matches, though crashes are frequent, loading and matchmaking are long, and no progress can be made.
There are a few ways this could play out. The best-case scenario is Activision is simply suffering a brief glitch that’s brought the servers down and normal service will be resumed very soon. Notably, this comes the day after the huge AT&T outage, which was eventually explained as “the application and execution of an incorrect process”.
It’s also sadly possible that the Call of Duty servers are under cyber attack. Crippling one of the most popular games on the planet would be a huge triumph for a hacking group, so say nothing of the chaos that erasing every player’s multiplayer progress would cause.
We have to imagine there are contingency and backup plans for what’s going on right now, though the official Twitter is ominously quiet. We’ll keep an eye on the server status and update this article when it’s time to go back to war. In the meantime let’s enjoy this brief moment of tranquillity online. Who knows, maybe we should give peace a chance?