If you’ve found yourself stymied at the sudden long wait times to log into Elder Scrolls Online as of late, well, it’s not completely inexplicable. ZeniMax said that it isn’t players’ imaginations; the system had a bug that created abnormally high delays for getting into the MMO.
The studio apologized for “dropping the ball” on comms during this worst of this, saying, “While many were in the game and playing, a significant number were essentially ‘stuck’ in queue with far higher queue times than expected. After a few hours of investigation, we identified the problem which boiled down to a backend system being in a bad state and needed to be restarted. However, due to there being so many players in queue when it was restarted, it took a long time to get everyone through the queue and into the game.”
ZeniMax said that queues may persist due to “so many new players in the game right now” thanks to the recent Epic Games Store promotion that rendered the base game free.
Source: Elder Scrolls Online. Thanks Sean!