Respawn had to briefly take down all their servers last night to fix a problem with the latest patch wiping out some player’s progress in Apex Legends.

Live games always have a bit of a problem: if something goes really wrong, then you can’t fix it unless you get every player to stop playing. Doing that is sort of like telling them to go play something else, which is not usually the message a game developer wants to send.

But sometimes, you have no other option. Fixing big problems requires decisive action, which is precisely what Apex Legends developer Respawn did yesterday when they took down all their servers.

There was a bit of a problem with the 1.1 update on Apex. While the patch was supposed to have a bunch of bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements, there was a super big bug that popped up relatively quickly. Some players logged in to find all their progress reset to level zero.

For players who paid for the Battle Pass, that’s a big problem. You don’t get the big rewards unless you rank up, and climbing that mountain all over again would be a horrific nightmare for casual players.

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Respawn explained the issue in the official Apex Legends subreddit. Apparently what happened is that some players’ data was moved to a completely different server accidentally, resetting them to zero and making it appear like all their progress had been lost. Respawn keeps backups of player data, but in order to get everyone back on the right server, they had to shut them all down while they performed the player shuffle.

Respawn Temporarily Shut Down Apex Legends Servers After Update Wiped Player Progress
via Fanbyte.com

The fix has been performed now, but at a cost. Everything that happened before patch 1.1 went live at 10 PM PST on April 3rd has been restored, but all progress made for unaffected players after the patch went live has been lost.

"Any in-game purchases and progress acquired during the time between 1.1 going live and the fix will be reverted - levels earned, items unlocked, packs opened, and spent currency,” a Respawn rep wrote. Anyone who didn’t download the patch at all will be completely unaffected.

While most players won’t be too upset, a few might have gotten a rare skin or two and might be somewhat peeved. On the plus side, anyone who made a purchase after the patch went live just got their money refunded, so there’s that.

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