Openreach details UK broadband traffic impact from GTA 6 pre-loading
Network access provider Openreach (BT) has revealed to ISPreview that the start of pre-loading for the GTA VI video game, which began at midnight Tuesday (10th Nov 2026), drove around a 33% increase in downstream traffic across their national broadband network versus an average Tuesday.
The hotly anticipated game is known to have a file size of around 212 GigaBytes (PS5), albeit varying a bit between different game console platforms. Overall Openreach saw elevated demand visible throughout the day and particularly overnight/late evening, which is roughly consistent with what other ISPs have been reporting.
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The network operator also shared a detailed hour-by-hour breakdown of how their overall network traffic differed when compared with a regular Tuesday, which is a lot more interesting to see than the limited data so far provided by a small number of retail ISPs.
The usual Content Delivery Networks (CDN), which often cache popular content closer in the network to end-users, should by now be helping to balance the strain. In theory this will soften a bit over the next few days as initial pre-loads complete, but there’s also the high possibility of release day (19th November) bringing a day-1 patch and higher than usual load from those who haven’t pre-ordered.
Total 24 Hour Network Traffic – 10th Nov 2026
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Must be all those PC users that have an emulator