After a Destiny 1 maintenance earlier today, players are reporting that their accounts and characters are missing, with third-party tools also showing years of progress gone.
Destiny 1 is more than eleven years old now, but for a lot of people, it is still the comfort game. Bungie has not added new content in a long time, yet the original raids, strikes, and Crucible still have a loyal core of players who log in to check off bounties, help new folks, or just relive some very specific 2014-2017 memories.
Because of that, Destiny 1 usually sits quietly in the background while Destiny 2 gets all the updates and new content. It is rare to see a “Destiny 1 maintenance” announcement these days. That is exactly what happened today, though, and from what players are saying, it may have made things a lot worse for anyone still playing on the original game.
Destiny 1 maintenance appears to have deleted player accounts and all characters
According to the official downtime notice from Bungie, Destiny 1 was taken offline today, December 10, at 10 am PST for planned maintenance, with an expected end time of around 2 pm PST, while Destiny 2 only had background work running during that window.
Once that window ended, Destiny 1 came back online. Very quickly after that, posts started to appear on Reddit and the Bungie.net forums from players saying that the game now treats their profile like a brand new account. Instead of loading into the Tower, they are being thrown straight to the character creation screen, with no sign of their old characters.
Update, December 10, 7:03 PM PT: The issue appears to be resolved and servers are back online.
Players checking third-party tools that read from Bungie’s API, such as Destiny Item Manager, WastedOnDestiny, and Destiny Raid Report, say those sites now show no Destiny 1 characters or activity for affected accounts. Everything looks as if the account has never touched Destiny 1 at all.
There have been tons of reports from players across social media. On Reddit, a post titled “Help, Destiny 1 server connection error leads me to the character creation screen. Characters deleted?” describes a player who only started a week ago. “I started playing Destiny 1 for the first time a week ago on my PS5, and today the game gave me an error.”
Another user said, “Lost connection to servers and now I cannot find my characters. My characters are now not showing up on the sign-in screen, and it says that it cannot find my account on DIM.”
Over on the Bungie forums, another user created a thread, titled “All D1 Progress has been deleted”, with the them saying: “All D1 progress has been deleted after maintenance has been concluded. When will we get our characters back?”
Another Bungie.net user reported: “All my characters in Destiny 1 have been deleted after a black screen” before being dumped to character creation. A different player added, “I lost my character under similar circumstances. Does anyone have a way to contact Bungie to find out what is going on?”
On top of that, some players say Destiny 1 has been brought back offline again, with the game now showing a maintenance message instead of letting them through to the title screen. That lines up with what you would expect if Bungie is trying to investigate a bad server-side change that only showed up once the game went live again.
What happens next for deleted Destiny 1 accounts?
At the time of writing, Bungie has not made any public statement that directly mentions deleted Destiny 1 accounts. The developer did put out a statement saying that Destiny 1 servers are being brought offline for emergency maintenance. So, it appears they are aware of the issue and are working on fixing it.
Since this is a widespread issue that seems to be hitting a lot of Destiny 1 players at once, one possible fix could be a full rollback on Bungie’s side, restoring account data from a backup taken before today’s maintenance. We have seen Bungie do limited rollbacks and restores in Destiny 2 in the past when server issues or bugs caused major problems, so it is not out of the question here either.
We also tested an older Destiny 1 profile that previously had three characters and a full history of raids and activities. In-game, that account now lands on an empty character selection screen, and the associated third-party tools no longer show any Destiny 1 data at all.
We will update this story when more updates are provided by Bungie.
In the meantime, have you checked your own Destiny 1 account? Are your characters and progress still there? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
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