Developer Rare took down the Sea of Thieves servers without any prior warning on October 29, 2024, to conduct “emergency maintenance.” Active players sailing the seas and looking for their next big treasure haul at the time were unceremoniously kicked out of the game, losing whatever riches they had in possession.
“We unfortunately have no choice but to take the Sea of Thieves servers offline now for emergency maintenance,” the studio stated on social media. “Our apologies for any disruption caused to your sailing – we’ll let you know as soon as you’re free to set sail again.”
There is no indication as to what exactly caused the urgent maintenance to happen. Usually, the servers are taken down and maintained according to a set schedule, allowing players to plan for the downtime and avoid losing any of their progress. Obviously, something unusual must have come up for Rare to take this drastic of a measure.
Rare recently had to disable certain game functions due to a bug associated with them, so it’s possible that it wants to apply the hotfix for this as soon as possible, but that’s not confirmed at the moment.
Sea of Thieves is currently following its 2024 update roadmap and was launched on PS5 earlier this yearwhere it achieved great results.