Bungie explains what caused the enormous 20-hour Destiny 2 outage

Earlier this week, Destiny 2 was rocked to its core. Following a hotfix, the game collapsed in on itself, with players reporting lost progress and data, all while server issues caused huge lag and connection issues. It didn't take long before Bungie brought the game offline and started to root out the problem and fix it before allowing players back into the game. This took a lengthy 20 hours however.

As for what caused the issue, in a new This Week at Bungie blog post (which also touched on Deepsight changes for the rest of the season and the next Festival of the Lost skins), Bungie explained what actually happened.

"We discovered that the issue was caused when some currently incompletable EDZ and Nessus Triumphs were moved from Forsaken into the archived Triumphs section," stated the Destiny developer.

"To make that change, we used a tool that can move player state from one location to another in the player's account. This tool is very powerful but requires careful and cautious handling. Due to a configuration error, we accidentally re-ran an older state migration process used for the Beyond Light release. As a result, we ended up re-copying old data from before Beyond Light into the current configuration, essentially undoing certain aspects of player progression since then."

Fortunately, Bungie could roll all player data back to where it was prior to the hotfix first being released, meaning aside from the outage period and a few worrisome hours beforehand, Guardians have been able to carry on as if nothing happened in the first place.

Granted, this situation has led to many in the community asking for a significant technical update to Destiny 2, which will no doubt be on Bungie's mind likely once the Light and Darkness Saga wraps up with Destiny 2: The Final Shape.