Rockstar Games launched its online multiplayer component last week, which was met with a slew of problems, beginning with the server issues prompted by the vast number of people eager to get online.

Although the games company has already warned of initial teething problems, the ongoing problems continue to frustrate players who want to log on to play the game.

The game went live on October 1, and an update was issued towards the end of last week to fix a number of bugs, which included character deletion.

However, the problem of character deletion continued over the weekend, with players' characters being deleted without warning.

Rockstar issued a statement on its support blog regarding the problem:

"If you have previously created a character but see an empty character selection screen when entering GTA Online, please back out to GTAV Story Mode and try re-entering GTA Online through the pause menu (repeat or wait until Rockstar cloud servers are back up). Do not create a new character in the empty slot where your character should be.

"If you receive the message 'The Rockstar Cloud Servers Are Unavailable', please return to GTAV Story Mode and follow the steps above. Please do not press "Retry" on the message and do not proceed online with saving disabled, as this may lead to overwriting your existing character.

"We apologize for this inconvenience and are working on a permanent fix for these issues."

Last month, the company has already warned of initial technical problems that may occur within the first few days of launch. Rockstar stated last week: "This sort of thing is inevitable in a massive open-world game and there'll surely be lots more unexpected oddities like this in the Online world next week. Rest assured we'll be monitoring and actively doing all we can to smooth such things out as they happen, but we need your help to find them, as well as your feedback to help fine tune all of the game's systems so everything is perfectly balanced."

Free content updates will continue to roll out for GTA Online.

The Grand Theft Auto V main title surpassed the $800 million figure on its launch date, reaching a record-breaking $1 billion in sales within three days of the launch. In just three weeks since its launch, GTA 5 has surpassed the lifetime sales of GTA 4.

The violent nature of the Grand Theft Auto gaming series has been widely criticized and is the most controversial video game series in history. The game has been accused of glamorizing violence, corrupting gamers, and has been connected to a number of real life crimes that stem from the violent nature of the game.