Heists arrive, GTA Online goes down

As you're probably aware by now, Rockstar Games today released Heists, a brand new 4-player cooperative gameplay experience for Grand Theft Auto 5's multiplayer mode GTA Online. With much anticipation, players have probably flocked to the game, seemingly causing the servers to buckle under the pressure.

Reports of server outages are widespread, with many players receiving the following error message when attempting to connect to GTA Online:  "The Rockstar game servers are currently unavailable right now."

For players who do manage to actually connect, they are reportedly unable to join heists or are getting kicked from heists randomly. Error messages include “The job failed to load” or “Files required to play GTA online could not be downloaded from Rockstar games service."

For anyone who has played GTA 5 since launch, you probably expected this sort of thing. The game experienced similar problems last year during the actual launch of GTA Online when technical issues plagued the launch of the multiplayer mode for at least a few days.

Rockstar appears to be aware of the problem, but recommends players experiencing issues to follow the instructions provided in the GTA Online Connection Troubleshooting page.

[GTA Forums]