Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail’s relatively smooth launch has hit its first hiccup. Earlier this evening, all servers across the North American Data Centers suffered a mass disconnection event that booted thousands of players.
Around 4:30pm CT, players began experiencing connection issues en masse in the form of error 90002, which disconnected them from the servers. Many were also hit with a lobby error 2002 upon trying to log back in, and were subsequently forced to reboot the game.
Players trying to log back in immediately after the disconnection were faced with a login queue in the thousands as everyone rushed to get back in—a Dawntrail first for many, considering the unexpectedly fast login times since the launch of early access.
Despite the massive scale, a one-time disconnection event pales in comparison to the awful login queues of the Endwalker release, which were so bad that server congestion was the biggest issue looming over the dev team leading up to Dawntrail’s launch. So far, the NA servers haven’t seen too many login issues, aside from the Aether Data Center—however, with players moving over to the relatively empty servers on Dynamis, the login times seem to have evened out overall.
As of the time of writing, the FFXIV servers are stable again and players haven’t had trouble staying online after the first mass disconnection that flared up. While there’s speculation on whether this was another continuation of the DDoS spree earlier this year, the official Lodestone announcement has made no mention of any cause beyond “unstable network conditions.” For now, whether this mass disconnect event was a one-time fluke or a portent of yet another Endwalker-style catastrophe remains to be seen.
