Update 2/3/2020: It appears as though online services have been restored. Original story follows.
Rockstar Games has had a tough February so far. On February 1st, the GTA Online servers went down for hours, and now it appears that the servers are down yet again. While Grand Theft Auto 5 is known to have outages every once in awhile, it's strange for it to happen two days in a row.
Like with yesterday's outage, this latest GTA Online server outage doesn't just impact Grand Theft Auto 5. Rockstar's service status page confirms that Red Dead Online, the Rockstar Games Launcher, and the Social Club are all experiencing issues as well. At the time of this writing, the services are listed as "limited" instead of "down," but it's clear that there are many people who are simply unable to access GTA Online and these other services at all.
Rockstar never said what exactly caused yesterday's GTA Online server issues, but speculation pointed to an influx of players overloading the servers. For the uninitiated, Rockstar is currently hosting a promotion in GTA Online that lets players get $2 million for free simply by logging in. It stands to reason that this huge chunk of change convinced many lapsed players to return to the game, and that in turn has caused the server problems. However, we must stress that this is just speculation and it's entirely possible that the Rockstar Games service outage has nothing to do with its $2 million promotion.
Unfortunately, it's unlikely that fans will get an exact answer as to why the GTA Online servers are down. They'll just have to keep trying to enter the games and hope for the best. Anecdotal evidence online suggests that there are some people who are still able to get into online sessions of Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2, so it doesn't appear to be impacting everybody.
The GTA Online server outage on February 1 lasted a few hours before it was resolved, but hopefully this latest one is resolved a bit quicker. After all, there are some gamers who only have time to play video games on the weekends, and technical issues like this prevent them from being able to play their favorite games. We'll update this post once the Rockstar Games service status page is updated to confirm that online services have been restored.
Grand Theft Auto 5 is out now for PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.