Major game servers offline in South Africa

Popular football game EA Sports FC’s servers in Johannesburg are offline, and players are seeing their game traffic rerouted to EA game data centres in Europe.

Players across Southern Africa have complained about higher latency in their online matches since 27 March 2024.

Developed by Electronic Arts (EA), EA Sports FC 24 is the successor to the company’s wildly popular Fifa-branded football games.

The Guinness World Records lists Fifa as the best-selling sports video game series of all time. EA Sports FC 24 has continued to perform well for EA despite doing away with the Fifa name.

Dropping Fifa from the game’s title and in-game content comes after EA and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa) ended a decades-long partnership last year.

EA’s first-ever football video game — Fifa International Soccer — was released in December 1993 for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis console. It was ported to multiple other systems and platforms — including MS-DOS, Game Boy, Super NES, and Master System.

Reports suggest that Fifa wanted EA to pay a $250 million (R4.7 billion) annual licencing fee to use its brand. The total cost of the four-year deal would have been $1 billion (R18.75 billion).

To put that in perspective, Fifa made close to $5.77 billion (R108 billion) in 2022, a World Cup year. $150 million (R2.8 billion) of that revenue came from the EA licencing deal.

EA Sports FC 24 players from all over Southern Africa started complaining about poor performance in their games on the EA support forums at the end of March.

According to the reports, the problems began on the evening of Wednesday, 27 March 2024.

Reports from South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, and Angola streamed into the forum.

By 11 April, the initial post had amassed over 550 replies. A separate forum thread titled “Fix the Servers in South Africa” had 55 replies at publication time.

As players pointed out, while Africa is experiencing a huge number of undersea cable breaks, the problems with EA Sports FC 24’s servers only began two weeks after a submarine landslide took out four cables off the coast of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.

When EA failed to provide details about its data centre problems for more than two weeks, a MyBroadband reader alerted us to the issue on Tuesday, and we immediately contacted EA for feedback.

EA responds, explains nothing

EA finally provided a response late on Wednesday evening.

Unfortunately, it simply used the submarine cable breaks as an excuse without explaining the delay between when the cables went down and the server outage.

“We are aware of an incident affecting Internet infrastructure in some parts of Africa due to damage to some underwater cables. As a result, some players in South Africa and surrounding regions are experiencing degraded online performance,” EA stated.

“We are currently routing impacted players to a different EA Sports FC 24 Data Center in an attempt to improve online performance, and are investigating options to improve connectivity.”

Interestingly, Southern African players reported that they were initially being routed to game servers in the Middle East. However, after EA’s latest response, their traffic started getting rerouted through Europe.

It is believed that EA uses the Ubisoft-owned I3D.net for its EA Sports FC 24 Data Center in Johannesburg.

MyBroadband contacted I3D for comment, but it did not respond by publication.

I3D’s system status page also blames the undersea cable breaks for increased latency on its services.

Curiously, the Discord real-time voice communication service, which is popular among gamers and also uses I3D, appears to be unaffected.

Last year when a submarine landslide off the Congo coast broke the West African Cable System and SAT–3, Discord users in South Africa saw their voice communications rerouted through servers in Europe.