The madness has subsided, for now.

The 'Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare' beta went public yesterday at 12 Noon PST. As you would expect when that time hit, it seems the entire globe flooded CharlieOscarDelta.com overwhelming the entire website. However, this was not the only website affected by the immense amount of computer traffic, as a matter of fact one site after another was shot down. Sooner than later dozens of popular gaming websites and blogs got taken down, either by traffic related difficulties or intentionally/precautiously by fear of permanent damage.

Seeing as though I have already been playing the beta for a few days prior to yesterdays craziness, I only ran into one problem. Now I am not sure how long this lasted, but when I fired up my 'Xbox 360' and loaded up my copy of the 'COD4:MW' beta, a message/prompt popped up clearly stating this: "Downloading Game Settings". From that point on the only thing I could do was change my settings in the game (I will not go into more detail than that). So what did I do? I did what any other 'Call of Duty' fan would do. I exited the beta to the dashboard and loaded up 'Call of Duty 2'. After playing a few Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch games (Roughly 1 hour), I decided to try running the beta once more. As luck would have it, it ran just fine.

Now, as I come into work this morning and check all these websites that were down last night, I come to find them all back up and running (as expected). I can only hope this madness doesn't happen again in the near future. I have found a few interesting articles discussing yesterday's incident; here and here.