Call of Duty update drives ‘broadband traffic’s busiest day ever’

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Call of Duty update drives ‘busiest day EVER for broadband traffic’ on Britain’s vast Openreach network

  • June 30 saw more than 189 petabytes of data used by Openreach customers
  • This smashed the previous record of 184 petabytes set on June 11 
  • Internet use has spiked as people work from home during COVID-19 pandemic  
  • Record-breaking usage also driven by a Call of Duty Warzone update  

By Joe Pinkstone For Mailonline

Published: | Updated:

Internet provider Openreach recorded the busiest day ever on its network on Tuesday, it has revealed. 

The vast network is used by internet providers BT, Sky, Plusnet and TalkTalk, with only rival Virgin using independent infrastructure. 

June 30 saw more than 189 petabytes of data consumed by customers via Openreach in the UK, smashing the previous record of 184 PB set on June 11.  

An overall increase in internet consumption has been driven by adults working from home and children doing online lessons during the coronavirus pandemic. 

Openreach says that in a pre-lockdown world, average weekly consumption was around 660 petabytes. At the start of June 2020, this soared to almost 1,000 PB. 

However, the record-breaking days on June 11 and now on June 30 were largely due to the mass downloading of enormous Call of Duty updates.   

Internet provider Openreach recorded the busiest day ever on its network on Tuesday, it has revealed. June 30 saw more than 189 petabytes of data consumed by customers (pictured, solid blue line)

The battle royale game Warzone released a huge update to its millions of worldwide fans at 11pm Pacific time on June 29, which was 7am on June 30 in the UK. 

Data from Openreach reveals a significant increase in usage throughout this day as gamers rushed to download the update.

Each user had to install the update in order to play and access the new features, and the update was between 22 and 36 GB in size. 

An Openreach spokesperson told MailOnline: ‘On Tuesday, we saw the busiest day ever for broadband traffic on the Openreach network (used by the likes of BT, Sky, Plusnet and TalkTalk), with more than 189 Petabytes of data being consumed. 

The battle royale game Warzone released a huge update to its millions of worldwide fans at 11pm Pacific time on June 29, which is 7am BST on June 30 in the UK. Data from Openreach reveals a significant increase in usage as people downloaded the update

The battle royale game Warzone released a huge update to its millions of worldwide fans at 11pm Pacific time on June 29, which is 7am BST on June 30 in the UK. Data from Openreach reveals a significant increase in usage as people downloaded the update

‘This compares to the previous busiest days of Thursday 11th June (184PB) and Sunday 28th June (175.7PB).

‘Tuesday saw the release of a patch for the Call of Duty game, which is popular with PlayStation, Xbox, PC and mobile gamers. 

‘There are also still huge numbers of people working and learning from home’

A petabyte is a measure of a huge amount of data, equivalent to 1,000 gigabytes. 

Call of Duty’s latest update was sent to more than 60 million users and gave them the ability to play different game modes, including a limited edition 200-person battle royale for quads.   

Internet usage soars due to coronavirus lockdown  

British daytime internet usage has skyrocketed as adults and children alike are stuck in the house during the hours of 9am to 5pm.

Data from Openreach, which owns and operates most of the UK’s phone broadband lines, reveals daytime data consumption has almost doubled in three weeks. 

On March 9, one week before Boris Johnson gave his first daily coronavirus press conference urging people to work from home wherever possible, the total amount of data used between 9am and 5pm was 27 petabytes.

On Monday March 30, this figure reached 51Pb, almost double the previous figure. One petabyte is the same as one million gigabytes.