Bungie opened up about the day-long Destiny 2 downtime in early 2023 that led to player character rollback, revealing it was caused by a mistake from its player retention team.
Back in January 2023, Destiny 2 players were hit with a bug that removed a bunch of triumphs progress as well as earned titles in the game. This led to a server outage followed by a character rollback. At the time, Bungie gave a general idea of what went wrong, but now, over two years later, we’re getting the full story straight from the development team.
Speaking during a talk at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2025 on Thursday, Destiny 2 principal technical designer Alan Blaine explained exactly what caused the chaos, and it all came down to a fast-moving internal strike team created to help improve player retention.
Destiny 2 Dev Talks Server Outage and Player Character Rollback
As first reported by PCGamer, Blaine walked through the ups and downs of a player retention team at Bungie. This team of developers was formed in late 2022 when Bungie noticed that Destiny 2’s player numbers were dropping “lower and faster than we’ve seen since 2018.” The idea was to move quickly, address player concerns, and bring some life back to the game.
This small team made some pretty noticeable changes early on. Blaine said the team helped remove annoying blue gear drops, sped up weapon crafting, and even made character customization better. But not everything went smoothly.
“Starting in September 2022 and continuing through November, our weekly active users dropped lower and faster than we’ve seen since 2018 with no known cause,” Blaine said during his GDC talk. “Similarly, player sentiment was also falling lower and faster than we’d seen.
“In our haste to ship quickly and vigorously, as was our mandate, we accidentally shipped a nasty character corruption bug that caused us to take the game down for 24 hours and issue only our second rollback of a character database in Destiny history.”
According to Blaine, there were a bunch of factors that led to it: a misconfigured tool, old documentation, and not enough time spent really understanding what could go wrong. A test even caught a hint of the problem, but no one realized how serious it was.
“There were a lot of causes for this bug: A misconfigured tool, out of date documentation, not enough time digging in to understand the risks of the solution. A test pass actually caught the symptoms of the bug, but none of us took it seriously enough or understood the root cause.”
Shortly after the server rollback, Bungie released a statement, explaining that the bug happened when “some currently incompletable EDZ and Nessus Triumphs were moved from Forsaken into the archived Triumphs section.”
“It was a decent bit of quality of life, but really wasn’t going to have as big an impact as we thought. It certainly wasn’t worth the risk,” said Blaine. “What we should have done is just killed it at the sticky note phase, going ‘this isn’t going to be a huge sentiment win,’ but at the time we were riding high off some of our early wins.”
The team was eventually disbanded in April 2023, with everyone going back to their normal jobs at the studio. Blaine still sees the effort as worth it overall, even with the big setback. “While we made one big mistake and we could have tightened up a few other things overall, it was a really good success,” said Blaine.
