Bungie explains why Destiny 2’s recent 20-hour server outage was a ‘tough call’

It felt almost like a new Collapse for Destiny 2 players who were not able to access the game at all for about 20 hours due to extended server maintenance yesterday into this morning.

But thankfully, the game’s dev team at Bungie has pulled back the curtain just a bit on what happened and why the game needed to be taken offline for nearly a full day right after a new hotfix just went live.

“We’ve been working quickly to build several new community-focused updates with the goal of making the Destiny 2 experience even better for everyone heading into Lightfall,” Bungie said in the Twitter thread. “Some of these were moved up from Lightfall’s launch for players to enjoy sooner, while others are all-new.”

Some of these quality-of-life updates were massive. Yesterday’s hotfix and another recent update included unlocking armor mods for all players, increasing the drop rate of Deepsight weapons in raids, a boost to Iron Banner and Gambit reputation gains, and more.

“Unfortunately, one of these updates unexpectedly caused an issue with Titles, Seals, and Catalysts losing progress for players, and we made the tough call to take the game offline to allow for a rollback,” Bungie said. “This required downtime to protect our players’ progress.”

The downtime began yesterday morning and concluded at about 9am CT today, but one big downfall from the necessary maintenance was that every player’s progress needed to be rolled back to wherever it stood at exactly 10:20am CT on Jan. 24.

“Game stability is a top priority, and our teams worked into the night to bring services back online as soon as possible with full functionality restored,” Bungie said. “We’d like to thank everyone at Bungie who helped to turn this around and get our players back into the game.”

Related: Destiny 2 is finally back online after nearly a day of emergency maintenance

With Lightfall now just less than a month away from its Feb. 28 launch, the dev teams across the studio are still hard at work on delivering a large-scale expansion on top of working on the current live game.

“As with any live service game, making changes (big or small) on behalf of players has the potential to cause unforeseen issues,” Bungie said. “We promise we’ll always move quickly to fix them as they come up. Thanks again for your patience.”