Sea of Thieves servers crushed under wave of would-be pirates

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Edit: It’s up and running now.

Sea of Thieves has just launched on Windows 10 and Xbox One, and it is already offline due to server overload. Developer Rare has confirmed the outage on its social media accounts.

Sea of Thieves is an online piracy simulator where you can work together with a crew to sail a ship to remote islands and into uncharted waters. You perform missions for computer-controlled characters, and you can get into battles with other players in their boats.

Microsoft and Rare spent the last several weeks running tests for Sea of Thieves on Xbox One and Windows. These were server stress tests designed to understand what kind of load the game would experience in a live environment. It turns out that even with all that testing, the game has still gone offline.

Some people are getting online, and Rare says it’s working to get everyone else on.