Grand Theft Auto Online Is Down For Many, Not Just You

Here on launch day for the Grand Theft Auto V (or GTA 5, whichever you prefer) online edition, it would appear that the suggestions of a server meltdown of sorts were not entirely unfounded. What's being seen across the grid – throughout the United States, at least – is the inability to launch online at all. Seeing an apology from Rockstar cloud services appears to be the predominant experience this morning as the Grand Theft Auto Online universe launches for the first time.

Before users get to the point at which they'll be able to play online, there's a bit of a download to be had. This download rings in at a cool 59MB and has – for the most part – seen little error or unavailability for all users. This isn't where the clog is happening. It's over at the servers reserved specifically for the game by Rockstar that you'll likely have been running into trouble.

Once prospective gamers are in on the action, they'll find Grand Theft Auto Online to be a prequel situation of sorts. Rockstar suggests that this environment exists several months before the events of Grand Theft Auto V, so you can expect repercussions of that timeline to have little effect on this one – of course the opposite won't be true either. Here we've got sort of an alternate universe, of sorts.

The first thing you'll see when you step into the action – after the intro you see above, that is – is a race. If you're playing Grand Theft Auto Online today, you'll likely be waiting to race against an opponent for an extended amount of time – in some cases, we've seen people waiting over an hour for an opponent to show up. If you can avoid it, it may be better to just have a bit of fun roaming the landscape this week instead.

Of course you could spend all your time on character creation. No worries there – that bit of the game appears to be working at full-tilt local speed at the moment as well. Have a peek at the timeline below to see more recent bits and pieces from the GTAV universe, and let us know if you've been able to successfully log in and start up your online GTA life today!