A few weeks ago, Bungie was forced to take Destiny 2 offline for an entire day to fix a bug in an update. While the fix didn't take as long (this time because the developers were aware of the situation), it was still several hours of downtime for a major online game.

One might wonder how this could happen to a well-established game run by a major, experienced game studio. If so, here's how that experienced major game studio explains it: the game is back online, and Bungie has posted an unusually in-depth and detailed explanation of what went wrong and what they are doing to avoid such gong shows in the future.

It's a long and complicated (but really interesting) story, but the short version is that, as is often the case, a bunch of little problems snowballed into a big problem, and then a mistake was made. Then another completely unrelated problem rekindled the first one, and the mess that we saw yesterday happened.

Everything is fixed now, but not without another character rollback. (Apparently for the second time in Destiny 2 history - Bungie says the first was a rollback two weeks ago.) Bungie also specifies seven "precautionary measures" to take in the future to prevent this particular problem (not others) from recurring.

While downtime and rollbacks can be frustrating, this explanation gives a little more insight than we usually get into how and why things can go so wrong so quickly and so completely.

"We know that today's outage and character rollback was frustrating, especially for those of you preparing for the launch of Crimson Days. We will continue to work hard to ensure that this does not happen again."