In case you’re wondering “is it just me?” The answer is no, it’s everyone. The LOTRO servers have been unavailable for new logins since about 3:30pm server time yesterday afternoon. I first noticed (stuck at the launcher message: installing pre-reqs) as I was trying to pop on to take a quick break from outside work yesterday…as soon as my launcher popped up I got a message from Mysteri asking if I was having trouble logging in. In fact, I was! I thought it was just me, but luckily Myst saved me some troubleshooting time. This was about an hour before the official notice from Turbine came out saying that they were working with a third party provider to resolve a routing issue. I saw other reports of people playing without issues until attempting to log out and back in, and others saying that they were eventually kicked out completely.
This is the second time in several months that an Internet problem has rendered the game useless for a segment of the LOTRO player base, although I suspect that this time it has affected everybody, evidenced by the fact that they took all login servers completely offline. As angry as some players are, imagine how steamed Turbine is that this has disrupted their business twice recently for such long periods of time. Since there is no ETA for resolution, there’s not much we as players can do except sit back, relax, and take in the latest Lotro Players News episode!
Update: Here is the official Turbine explanation for the downtime.
The way I read the explanation (and this is speculation on my part), it sounds as if the Internet backbone provider had a problem populating Internet routes into either Turbine’s data center routers, or the upstream ISP routers. Once that issue was resolved, the flood of dynamic routing updates caused additional issues in network equipment that was trying to re-learn all of the routes on the Internet at one time. That process is called “routing reconvergence” in tech land.
Update 2: And, we’re up! I knew as soon as I got this post out there those servers would come back!
All LOTRO game worlds are now available. Thank you for your patience and we apologize for the inconvenience.
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Thanks Brax! I feel like this issue might have been resolved quicker if it didn’t happen on a holiday weekend.
Hurray! Back up….Hmmm now I can’t get to the desktop… buuhuuu!
Hooray! Yep, I’m in. It wasn’t a total loss — I got so much cleaning done while the servers were down. :-p
‘…networking architecture based on hierarchical multi-grid geographical routing…’
…preventive strategy to avoid topological fragmentation of the IP address space by using a hierarchical allocation system that delegates control of segments of address space to regional network service providers.[1] This method facilitates regional route aggregation.
If anyone out there would like to try and explain what is happening to the routing that is so affecting LOTRO please do… this is all goobledygook to me!
Saying that and after ‘trying’ to read up on it yesterday I do think turbine did a great job getting it up and running again…
What would we do if the INTERNET broke?
I wouldn’t worry about the goobledygook as it doesn’t really have anything to do with yesterday’s problem. It’s just how the Internet is built (allows for route summerization and smaller routing tables…but…blah blah blah)
While others on “the outside” might disagree, I also think that Turbine did a good job recovering, and here’s why: With cascading network problems, it’s much better to be slow and methodical than to assume that you’ve fixed the problem, announce that you’ve fixed the problem, only to find out that the problem has moved someplace else and have to shut everything down again. The fact that they took so long shows me a) that the network team is experienced and understands this and b) that the ‘higher ups’ in charge of making the call to go back online are smart enough to listen to their network engineers.
Those are two real positives in my book.