Bungie pulls Destiny 2 offline following relaunch day server woes
Emergency maintenance ongoing.
Today's a big day for Destiny 2; not only is new paid expansion Shadowkeep out in the wild, the game (now divorced from publisher Activision) is being relaunched as a partially free-to-play title on consoles and Steam. Unfortunately, ongoing server issues have now forced developer Bungie to take both Destiny 2 and its predecessor offline for emergency maintenance.
When Destiny 2 came back online around 6pm today, following scheduled maintenance, many found themselves unable to play, with Bungie having implemented a temporary queuing system, presumably to ease traffic into the game after today's free-to-play launch.
As the evening progressed, however, an increase in servers errors and other issues was reported, leading Bungie to disable key online services.
Silver purchases were disabled on Steam, for instance, while stats, forums, and third-party applications were brought offline. Although some issues were investigated and resolved, players then began to report difficulties signing-in, a problem apparently widespread enough to force Bungie to take both Destiny games offline for "emergency maintenance".
At the time of writing, that maintenance is still ongoing over an hour later, with Bungie's official Help account on Twitter recommending that players "stay tuned for updates".
While we await further developments, why not check out Eurogamer's run-down of everything new in Destiny 2 today, or amuse yourself with this video of the kind-of-new opening sequence introduced as part of free-to-play component, New Light? I'll update this story with additional information as it comes in - but will probably stop when it's time to go to bed.