https://steamcharts.com/app/231430
161,908 playing an hour ago
161,908 24-hour peak
161,908 all-time peak
I will explain why there was 160k Coh2 players on Steamcharts, and nowhere near that in the game.
Steam card farming is quite popular, and many players run the program which emulates you playing the game. You don't need to launch or download the game, the program just pretends that you are playing on Steam. After 2-6 hours of this, your get your cards, which you can sell on Steam.
This is more of the speculation, but it might explain why the servers were fine on Friday, but stuggled on Saturday. The player's jumped to the card farming on Friday, without even downloading the game, which didn't tax Relic's servers at all. The players who actually played the game had to download it, and it is no small game, so a lot of the players didn't even play it on Friday. So come Saturday, card farmers have moved on, while the actual players started logging-into the game and playing, which was more than Relic servers could handle.
Steamcharts are counting everyone, while Relic's ingame online players only show the ones who have connected to the server.