The Destiny 2 emergency outage yesterday that led to frustration across gaming sites and Reddit yesterday has been repaired, but it was not without its casualties. So what the heck happened? The same thing that happened in January.
According to Bungie’s post-mortem, it’s all down to “a game bug involving inventory management and a series of server configurations that re-introduced the bug after it was fixed” – that’s why people were losing money and mats like mad yesterday. Tweaks to inventory sorting based on timestamps led to a bug with calculations for stacks that was incorrectly identified as a debug problem and not a real bug. Server setting misfires between the first issue in January and the one yesterday then led to what sure sounds like a breakdown in protocol, leading to the currency losses and then the emergency outage for the server.
“In that time, hundreds of thousands of unique players had logged into the game or accessed their characters through a third party service. Our investigation uncovered what we thought was an impossible situation: a small number of our WorldServers had loaded without the correct configuration which fixed the corruption issues from 2.7.1. Unfortunately, anyone whose characters had been accessed using one of these out-of-date servers encountered the character-corrupting problem.”
Going forward, the team promises a better system for hot-patching as well as for preventing these issues, but it was still forced to roll back the servers several hours. “”With today’s rollback, all character accounts will now be in the state they were at around 8:30 AM PST,” the studio writes. “The team is also hard at work in preparing Hotfix 2.7.1.2 with a planned release on February 13th. Also of note, this Hotfix will include a fix for the infinite Dawnblade issue.” No mention of additional compensation was made.
Destiny 2 is back online. Thank you for being patient.
Our development team recaps why this issue recurred and what we are doing to prevent it from happening again.https://t.co/qMAH9tjpwN pic.twitter.com/4qBt5vrMi7
— Bungie (@Bungie) February 12, 2020
