Starbreeze insists it is "working hard" to keep servers online after Payday 3 players endured a second consecutive evening of disruption.

After a three-day early access period for some players, Payday 3 released on 21st September, but players have struggled to get online at peak times due to continuing server issues that have shutdown matchmaking, making it impossible to play the always-online heist shooter.

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On launch day, Starbreeze took to its social media accounts to admit that it was "currently experiencing slow matchmaking" and was "investigating and working on a solution".

Five hours later, servers were still down, and despite issuing server-side fixes, "instability in the matchmaking" persisted across all platforms.

We're sorry to report that matchmaking is still unavailable, our team is working overtime to get this resolved.

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"We realise that the matchmaking issues are frustrating, they are for us as well," the team said at the time. "We're still here and still working on getting you all back into the game, stay tuned."

By the time the UK was back in work/school/university, things had stablised, only for the servers to go belly up once more at around 5pm UK time.

We have deployed some fixes, but we're still seeing instability in the matchmaking. We're continuing investigation and will keep working on addressing this.

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"We're seeing an increase of matchmaking issues, the team is investigating," the studio announced. "We're now seeing all platforms unable to matchmake, the team is working hard to restore functionality."

Over the next 15 hours, players continued to experience issues getting into the game, once again primarily affecting UK and European players hoping to play at the end of the working day, and then bleeding into the gaming time of US players, too.

Status update: Things are starting to look better. We're seeing players being able to create lobbies again and getting back in the game. You still might have a few issues, bear with us while we focus on stabilising! Thank you heisters! pic.twitter.com/wP8tM6yJmG

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At the time of writing, Starbreeze says "things are starting to look better" and that it's "seeing players being able to create lobbies again and getting back in the game", although some players are reporting issues connecting online this morning, too.

As you may well expect, comments on the studio's social media posts range from high praise and thanks for working to rectify the issues, to despair that Starbreeze insisted Payday 3 would break protocol with its predecessors and offer strictly online-only play – essentially preventing players from getting into a game at all whilst the server issues persist.

Payday 3 developer Starbreeze recently confirmed the upcoming heist shooter would not have the controversial DRM system Denuvo after all.

In a concise update posted to Steam, Starbreeze simply said hello to its heisters and revealed in no-nonsense terms that "Denuvo is no longer in Payday 3".