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1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsDuring Final Fantasy XIV’s Endwalker launch in December 2021, record player activity overwhelmed the game’s login capacity. Players encountered long queues and congestion errors, and Square Enix temporarily halted sales of the game to new players. The bottleneck was not simply a shortage of internet bandwidth: the publisher said it needed many server machines to add each in-game World, but pandemic-related semiconductor and logistics problems delayed hardware procurement.
What happened during the Endwalker launch?
With Endwalker Early Access underway in December 2021, Square Enix reported the highest active-player count in the game’s history to that point, alongside record simultaneous logins. Producer and director Naoki Yoshida said connection demand had “far surpassed the scale of our services,” resulting in long waits to log in. Square Enix’s notice on login errors and resolutions described congestion controls, queue limits, and errors that could send some players back to the end of a queue.
This was a serious login problem, not evidence that every part of the game was unavailable to every existing player. At the time, Square Enix said queues were capped at 17,000 players per logical data center and that it planned to raise the limit to about 21,000 using backup development servers. Those figures describe the system in the December 2021 notice; they are not current queue limits.
Why couldn’t Square Enix add servers quickly?
The capacity fix Square Enix described was to add Worlds in different regions. A World is a player-facing game server hosted within a logical data center; that logical layer is distinct from the physical data center facility. Yoshida said, “We need tens of ‘server machines’ for every World that we add.”
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Square Enix said it could not obtain enough of the required hardware quickly. Yoshida attributed the delay to COVID-19 countermeasures that had halted some semiconductor factories or left them short of workers, reducing chip output, while logistics networks were also under pressure. Even after the company made a larger-than-usual investment to secure equipment, lead times remained long. Yoshida said the company could not estimate when the semiconductor shortage would be resolved.
That account connects the shortage to the game’s capacity problem, but it does not mean a single missing chip caused the launch congestion. Each added World required many server machines, and acquiring and deploying that equipment took time.
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Why did Square Enix stop selling the game?
Square Enix temporarily suspended sales and delivery of the Starter Edition and Complete Edition to new players while congestion was severe. The step managed incoming demand; it did not add server capacity or resolve existing login queues. A contemporaneous Data Center Knowledge report described players facing hour-long queues and the temporary sales halt.
In January 2022, Square Enix said digital sales would resume on January 25, as Oceania’s new data center opened and playtime and login frequency moved toward normal. The company also reserved the option to suspend sales again if extreme congestion returned. The January roadmap frames the decision as a response to that particular period, not a permanent sales policy.
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How did Square Enix expand capacity?
The January 2022 roadmap paired new regional capacity with staged additions and reorganizations. The dates below are the plans Square Enix announced at the time; they should not be read as independently verified completion dates for every later phase.
| Region | Plan announced in January 2022 |
|---|---|
| Oceania | Open a new logical data center on January 25, 2022, with five Worlds. Square Enix said the launch had been brought forward by about two weeks from its previous schedule. |
| Japan | Reconfigure a logical data center around July 2022. |
| North America | Add capacity in a first phase around August 2022, followed by a second phase in spring or summer 2023. |
| Europe | Add capacity in a first phase in July 2022, followed by a second phase in summer 2023. |
The new Oceania logical data center was called Materia and began with Bismarck, Ravana, Sephirot, Sophia, and Zurvan, according to the contemporaneous trade-press report. Square Enix’s Patch 6.08 notes later marked the Oceanian data center’s opening.
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Regional capacity matters because players connecting to a closer region can benefit from lower network latency, while a new region also provides room for more players there. It is separate from expanding the number of in-game Worlds within an existing logical data center. Square Enix did not disclose some physical facility locations for security reasons, so claims about the exact location of those facilities should not be treated as established by these announcements.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Was this a game-server failure or a semiconductor shortage?
It was both a demand-capacity mismatch and a hardware-procurement problem. Record activity exposed limits in the login and service scale; the durable response required more server machines, which Square Enix said it could not procure on its desired timetable because of semiconductor production and logistics constraints. In the short term, login controls and the sales pause managed pressure. New regional capacity and staged expansions were the longer-term measures.
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