Bungie's Destiny 2 patch deleted player progress and forced a 20-hour outage and rollback

On Tuesday 24 January 2023, Bungie released a regular patch to tweak Destiny 2's sandbox. Many players quickly noticed the game had deleted certain triumphs, seals and catalysts. Two hours after the release, at 2PM ET, Bungie took the game offline to investigate.

After hours of testing, Bungie said it would roll back all player accounts to their state as of 8:20AM PST, 40 minutes before the patch. Any progress in that window and the roughly two hours after it was lost, and players who had earned loot from weekly raids, dungeons, bounties and other content had to replay it once servers returned. The game was back after about 20 hours with patch 6.3.0.6, which Bungie said resolved the progression loss.

The Verge noted that Destiny 2, a looter shooter with around 800,000 players logging in each day across PC, Xbox and PlayStation, suffered the outage just over a month before its next major expansion, Lightfall.

About 20 hours offline for a game with roughly 800,000 daily players, plus lost progress and loot for about two hours of play around the patch.

A routine sandbox-balance patch had an unintended effect on stored player progression data.

Bungie could not repair the deleted items in place, so it restored every account to a prior state.

Rolling back servers means progress made just before and after the patch is lost, which shifted the cost onto players.

A patch that touches player data needs a rollback tested before it ships. When it fails, a full-account rollback trades a clean fix for lost progress.

Servers came back online with patch 6.3.0.6, which Bungie said fixed the issue causing progression loss for the affected Triumphs, Seals and Catalysts. Lightfall was due just over a month later.