Video Games

Sea of Thieves servers suddenly taken offline for “emergency maintenance”

An unusual disruption

Marco Wutz

Rare / Microsoft

Developer Rare took down the Sea of Thieves servers without any prior warning on October 29, 2024, to conduct “emergency maintenance.” Active players sailing the seas and looking for their next big treasure haul at the time were unceremoniously kicked out of the game, losing whatever riches they had in possession.

“We unfortunately have no choice but to take the Sea of Thieves servers offline now for emergency maintenance,” the studio stated on social media. “Our apologies for any disruption caused to your sailing – we'll let you know as soon as you're free to set sail again.”

There is no indication as to what exactly caused the urgent maintenance to happen. Usually, the servers are taken down and maintained according to a set schedule, allowing players to plan for the downtime and avoid losing any of their progress. Obviously, something unusual must have come up for Rare to take this drastic of a measure.

Rare recently had to disable certain game functions due to a bug associated with them, so it’s possible that it wants to apply the hotfix for this as soon as possible, but that’s not confirmed at the moment.

Sea of Thieves is currently following its 2024 update roadmap and was launched on PS5 earlier this year, where it achieved great results.

Published
Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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