Electronic Arts has experienced some issues lately with online services across its many popular games. Throughout the latter half of February, EA experienced three separate instances of server failures. EA’s “EA Help” Twitter page was consistently updating players on the status of the outages without sharing any reason for their occurrence. These outages were prevalent across many of EA’s most popular titles including Need for Speed and FIFA. Over the course of the outages, players were completely unable to use any online services or game modes.
The server outages not only affected some of EA’s most populated games, but also its game launching service, Origin. This left many players helpless to log in and play any online game in their library. Users were forced to start Origin in offline mode and see what little gaming they can do from there. The multiple server outages were over the course of two weeks, taking place on February 18th, 27th, and 29th.
According to Game Rant, the actual cause of these server issues was unclear. One aspect of these server failures that left many players confused was the inconsistency at which players were disconnected. While some users could not access any online features, other players were able to play online without any complications. These outages were especially detrimental to games that are strictly online. For example, Apex Legends requires the player to connect to the internet before they are able to access the main menu. During these server outages, Apex Legends players could not even sign in and access the single-player firing range training mode. Even offline features like this were locked behind a wall that required online access.
EA has no big games about to release, and none of its popular titles are undergoing large events just yet. Fans are still unaware what exactly caused these issues, or how widespread they actually were. If the consistent server failures continue, fans hope that EA will be able to solve the issues quickly. Each of the three outages in February occurred on weekends and lasted multiple hours, leaving many players disappointed during the short time-frame they can enjoy a video game.
Server outages and connectivity issues could be a real problem for the success of so many games today that are strictly online. Once the internet connection shuts down, a game such as Apex Legends becomes completely unplayable. Perhaps developers should always be including some form of offline play in order to keep internet-dependency to a reasonable standard. For games as massive and profitable as FIFA and Apex Legends one can only imagine EA’s mad dash to solve these problems. As future events and updates are certainly planned for these games, players can only hope EA’s server issues will not rise again.
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Source: Game Rant