WARDOGS went into Early Access at 16:00 UTC and peaked at 337,157 concurrent players — more than three times the 105,774 the Closed Beta reached, and the number every fault of the evening sits underneath.
What the hotfix says
The post is short and unusually specific about symptoms. The client update, in Bulkhead's own list, is intended to address:
- Players unable to join servers.
- Players being unexpectedly kicked from servers during play.
- Extended login queue times.
It is a client update, so it only arrives by restarting. Every logged-in player was forced to close
the game and download it, and everyone then returns to the login queue — after which the studio said
it would begin allowing players into the game in controlled batches
, widening them as it
confirmed players were entering and populating servers successfully. The closing line was that the
team would be working through the night
.
On X the studio added that backend services were offline at that moment and would be back shortly.
What the evening actually looked like
The queue was the first fault, and it was not the queue anyone had planned for. It sat in front of the main menu rather than in front of a server, so the beta-era advice to pick a quieter region had nothing to act on — players were waiting at 40,000, then 100,000, then past 350,000 before the game would draw its own interface.
The second was the reset loop. Reaching the front and hitting an "Access Denied" panel sent players to the back of a longer queue than the one they had joined: 70,000 to 168,000, 90,000 to 280,000, 116,000 to 350,000, several people more than once. Bulkhead cleared the queue outright at one point to restart the login service, kicking everyone waiting in it, and its CEO pointed publicly at Steam's capacity allocation for the game as part of why the queue ran as long as it did.
The third arrived around 18:05 UTC, once people started getting through: a join timeout, error
1628505091, refusing every server on the browser with "Failed to connect to the server in a
reasonable time". It had no public record anywhere before that afternoon.
One claim circulating from the evening — that the authentication and hosting providers were under a DDoS attack — appears in no developer post on Steam, X or Discord, and is not repeated here as fact.
Where this lands on the site
The hotfix is the current answer on four pages, all re-sourced to it tonight: error 1628505091, which is new; kicked back to the main screen; the queue that never moves; and failed to authenticate.
No stat on this site moves because of it. This is a stability patch — no prices, no XP curve, no unlock levels — so the current build stamp stays at Season 1 and the patch notes page is unchanged. The live tracker is where to watch what happens next.