Call of Duty: Warzone's Season 5 patch caused a huge data spike on one UK ISP on Wednesday. Virgin Media witnessed a 60% spike in traffic compared to the previous Wednesday, a significant portion of which the company attributed to the latest CoD update. [According to Virgin Media's records, Wednesday's downloads equated to 52 PS4-sized (33.9 GB) Warzone patches per second during peak hours. This means that between Monday and Friday, 22 petabytes of data were added by one ISP alone.

The last time a surge of this magnitude occurred was in Call of Duty: Warzone's mid-season 4 update on June 30. Yes, Call of Duty did it again.

Call of Duty's file size is over 200 GB on PC. The latest PC update was 47.4 GB, but the overall file size is not that much larger (but still incredibly large) because the file size is reduced once the download is complete. That's great for you, the player, but not for your ISP.

However, it would be incorrect to attribute this feat to CoD alone; a smaller game called "Fortnite" also did a 2GB update on the same day, which may have contributed somewhat to the uproar.

Picture a world in which game developers have to stagger their schedules to avoid piles of updates.

In this case, however, there were reportedly no bottleneck concerns as a result of the CoD patch. Phew. But this is only one ISP, and it's a UK ISP at that. I shudder to think of the total number of bytes transferred in the hours after Activision dropped the patch.