Lots of info in this one about the past month or so of server instability and some insight into what's been causing it.
I'll try to TL;DR/ELI5 this but I encourage everyone to read the article:
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There is a service called "Claims" that helps run Destiny 2. It "syncs" the Destiny 2 game client to the game servers to "save" your progress. Changes were made to Claims before Lightfall to help it handle more traffic but it's not working as expected. Claims keeps getting interrupted for various reasons, which puts your game client out of sync with the server, forcing a disconnect.
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"...Claims handles a tremendous amount of volume, routing every single kill, orb, or unit of Glimmer in Destiny 2 to the correct recipient."
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Normally to fix issues like this they do a rolling restart to the Claims service, which causes disconnects but not downtime. This isn't working and they have to bring the whole Claims system down at the same time to restart. Without Claims online Destiny 2 cannot run, hence the repeated emergency downtime.
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They are working to fix this issue and have listed specific patches over the next few months where they're targeting fixes:
- Mid Season 21 Update (7.1.5)
- Season 22 Launch (7.2.0)
- Season 23 Launch (7.3.0)
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They're emphasizing that this is not something they can fix overnight or quickly. They also emphasize that the process of fixing it could potentially introduce more instability. They're implementing a lot of tracking, alerting, and testing tools to help them figure out a fix.
Next week will have increased drop rates for Exotic fish!
After that the TWID goes into the regular community stuff.
Sounds like they really screwed up with whatever they did pre-Lightfall if it's taking them nearly a year to fix. I'm curious to learn what the root cause was and how it was missed during testing. As an IT person it's interesting for me to see these kinds of case studies and the kind of stuff you have to deal with when you're working on something that has the scale of Destiny 2.