  
**Summary:**

* They had around **200,000 players hit the queue almost immediately**, far beyond the scale they had originally planned for. Six months earlier, they were designing around roughly **30,000 peak concurrent players**.
* The **queue initially worked**, but players repeatedly dropping out/rejoining caused it to get into a broken state. The developer repeatedly says this part is **their fault**.
* They eventually managed to clear the queue and thought they'd succeeded, they were literally about to celebrate and then watched the player/server numbers suddenly collapse.
* They say they were then hit by a **DDoS attack**. They'd also suffered attacks during the beta.
* Although they managed to mitigate the attack itself, it left parts of the infrastructure in a **"stale" state**. Some servers might only contain five players while the backend incorrectly believes they're full because communication between systems has broken.
* They refer to these broken servers as **"stale", "zombie" or "orphan" servers**. Players landing on those servers get kicked/disconnected while people who happened to land on healthy servers can continue playing.
* There **was a priority queue system**, apparently intended for streamers/others, but the developer says **it wasn't actually functioning properly**. So streamers getting in while others couldn't wasn't necessarily because they were being deliberately prioritised. Many streamers simply got in early enough to land on healthy servers.
* There was also a separate problem where **some legitimate players were being banned as cheaters**. They traced at least one cause to a particular network card being incorrectly detected by the anti-cheat system, and say they're fixing it.
* Their solution at this point is effectively to **"burn it down" / clean-slate the servers**  shut down the broken state and restart everything rather than trying to recover all the stale instances individually.
* The developer says this is precisely one reason they **launched on a Thursday rather than Friday**: it gives them some time to deal with launch problems before the weekend.
* They acknowledge this is a scale they've **never dealt with before**, describing it as approaching an **MMO-style launch**.
* He repeatedly takes responsibility rather than solely blaming the attackers: essentially, *yes, there was a DDoS, but their infrastructure needs to be able to cope with this stuff and ultimately it's on them*.
* He openly tells unhappy players to **refund the game and buy it again once it's working** rather than asking people to hang onto a broken product.
* He finishes by saying they're going to fix it, asking people to **give them some time**, and apologising for the launch.



Joe Brammer CEO of Bulkhead explains on BigFry's stream why the servers are having issues.