Rocket League was down for ages over the weekend after issues with a server upgrade

If you couldn't get into a game of Rocket League over the weekend, you're not alone. Because of some weird technical difficulties, players were removed from the game's servers while it was put into "maintenance mode" on and off over the last few days. It couldn't have come at a more inconvenient time either, as the issues caused a bunch of official esports matches to be pushed back, too.

It all started on Thursday, after what seemed to be a regular maintenance update to PsyNet (the network that connects players across platforms in Rocket League). This update had broken something somehow, as the Rocket League devs took to Twitter on Friday to inform players they were investigating "server access issues" - then a short while later players were informed it was all fixed. Except it wasn't properly fixed, because this continued to happen multiple times on Saturday and Sunday.

Last night though, the on-again off-again servers finally seemed to be sorted: "Thank you for your patience this weekend, and we're sorry for the downtime," Psyonix said in their last tweet, but what went wrong?

In a message to players on the Rocket League Discord, a developer from Psyonix explained that they weren't a server problem, but a PsyNet problem:

"What that means is the game servers are fine, but we are having trouble with 1) putting players into servers, and 2) other services that call into PsyNet (updating XP after a match, Challenges, Item Shop, etc.)

"The maintenance we did on Thursday was a PsyNet upgrade, moving to a new version of MySQL (database management system), this is where we are having issues at the moment".

It all seems to have been resolved now, but unfortunately for anyone looking forward to the first week of the Rocket League Championship Series (RLCS), you'll have to wait until a later date to watch, because the matches have been postponed.

"Competitive integrity is of the utmost importance and we don't want players and teams playing on shaky ground," the developers wrote in a post on Reddit. "We're currently planning how we'll reschedule the matches and we should have an update for you early next week in that regard."

Due to the disruption, the Rival Series Play-In brackets have been postponed, too - the North American matches are pushed back to February 8th at 2pm EST (7pm GMT), and the European matches are pushed back to February 9th at 1pm CET (12pm GMT).

In other Rocket League news, I reported last week that the developers are stopping support for the game on Mac and Linux because the platforms represent less than 0.3% of the active player base. It's also one of the games able to use a new add-on for the Xbox Adaptive Controller that lets you play the game with a power wheelchair.