While I consider Overwatch to be one of the finest games I've ever played, it is not without its issues. The most annoying of these is the magically disappearing reconnect button, something that might sound hilarious right now, but is anything but when you're desperately trying to rejoin a game after the server kicked you out due to the yet another DDOS attack. There are very few things that sent me on a tilt, but the feeling of completely screwing over my entire team is certainly one of them - especially when the whole thing is outside of my control!
If you share a similar story, and I can almost guarantee you do because I've never seen the reconnect button actually working, you'll be glad to hear that the Overwatch team is currently hard at work on fixing just this issue. Best of all, they're also looking into increasing the buffer time so those that disconnect actually have a chance to come back and help their team secure victory. Here's the full message from Overwatch's Game Director Jeff Kaplan:
"We're looking into a few issues now. The fact that a disconnected player is not able to rejoin a match is a bug. We're also looking at the buffer time given to a player to rejoin a match without getting a leaver penalty. We need to fix the bug first before we can address the second part. QA and our Server Engineers are actively working on this right now.
Apologies I do not have an ETA. This might take 2-3 weeks to fix based on our current patching schedule but we'll do our best to try to fix it sooner."
It may have taken them the entirety of Season 1 and a month of Season 2 to finally realize the damned thing doesn't work, but at the very least it appears that a fix is coming in the near future. The current estimate puts this patch within the next 2-3 weeks, but as with all software development its important to keep in mind that delays can and often do happen! Until then, my advice is to never close Overwatch if you end up being disconnected as your chances of actually coming back after that are quite minuscule.