Openreach says GTA 6 pre-load lifted traffic on its UK broadband network by about 33%, ISPreview reports

Openreach says the first day of Grand Theft Auto VI pre-loading raised downstream traffic on its UK broadband network by around 33% compared with an average Tuesday. ISPreview published the figure on November 13, 2026, saying Openreach gave it to the site. None of the figures come from Rockstar, and we have found no Rockstar comment on them.

In the UK, pre-load opened at midnight on Tuesday, November 10. ISPreview says Openreach recorded 377.98 petabytes that day against 284.46 on an average Tuesday, or +32.9%. The biggest jumps were overnight: +94.9% at 04:00 and +93.1% at 05:00. By midday the gap had shrunk to about 12%. ISPreview says demand was elevated all day, “particularly overnight/late evening”.

ISPreview reported on November 11 that Virgin Media had announced a “record-breaking 24 hours” on its UK broadband network. The figures are Virgin Media’s, as ISPreview relays them. Its previous evening peak record, set during an Arsenal v Atlético Madrid match in the Champions League, was beaten by 3.8%. Its daily volume record, set by the Fortnite Chapter 7 Mini Season release on November 1, was beaten by 4%. Between midnight and 1am on November 10, traffic was up 51.6% on the previous week. Jeanie York, Virgin Media O2’s chief technology officer, said GTA VI was “already proving to be a record-breaking moment for our network”.

ISPreview also reports that YouFibre told customers on November 10 of a “network capacity issue” that it put down to “the high demand of GTA 6 downloads”, and says the provider later resolved it through “emergency traffic management to spread the load”. Those are YouFibre’s words as quoted by ISPreview. We have not seen the notice ourselves.

Eurogamer, in a piece published on November 13 that looks ahead to release day, quotes Trevor Linney, Openreach’s director for network technology, as telling it that GTA 6 had been “on our radar for a long time”. He said the network and teams were ready and that Openreach would be watching for a new download record. Eurogamer does not say when he spoke, and its piece does not carry Openreach’s pre-load figures. It also quotes an Ofcom spokesperson saying broadband networks “should be well placed to handle this download”.

For readers: ISPreview gives the file size as around 212GB on PS5, varying a little by platform. That is in line with Rockstar’s November 3 pre-load post, which said the file needs “up to 212 GB” depending on the device. One thing to read carefully in Openreach’s table: the overnight hours show the largest percentage rises, but the heaviest traffic was still in the evening, at about 28.4 petabytes in the hour from 20:00 against about 7.1 at 04:00. That is our reading of the table, not advice from the networks.

None of these reports describes a wider outage. The figures are traffic totals supplied by the networks, and ISPreview is a trade site reporting them.