Fortnite Drives Broadband Traffic Record at UK ISP Virgin Media

Broadband ISP Virgin Media UK (VMO2) has reported that the release of Fortnite’s original map on Friday 3rd November 2023, which formed part of the popular video game’s “Fortnite OG” update, resulted in the operator experiencing a record daily surge in network traffic with a total of close to 154,000 TeraBytes (TB) being downloaded.

The result reflects a 10% increase on the previous record, which was set on its network during Sunday 16th April 2023 (140,00TB). But it’s entirely possible that this could soon be eclipsed by the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III on Friday 10th November, which is said to have a rumoured 234GB (GigaByte) file size to download on day one. No doubt ISPs are going to love that one.

Paul Kells, Director, Network Strategy & Engineering at Virgin Media O2, said: “We’ve seen over the years that gaming and its frequent and chunky updates cause record data usage on our network. This has often coincided with a Call of Duty or Warzone update so it’s interesting to see that our customers and fans of Fortnite have all jumped back online in such large numbers. With our gigabit network, backed up by our market leading Wi-Fi guarantee, it is the perfect ally to keep gamers ahead of the game.”

Internet providers typically use sophisticated Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and other systems to help manage the load from such events, which caches popular content closer in the network to end-users (i.e. improves performance without adding wider network strain). But demand for data is constantly rising and broadband connections are forever getting faster, thus new peaks of usage are being set all the time by every ISP. This is as true today, in the era of full fibre, as it was in the early days of dialup.