Star Citizen's New Update Caused a 'Major Outage'

gamerant.com:

The long-awaited launch of Star Citizen update 3.18 has come with a comprehensive set of problems, making the game outright unplayable for the vast majority of players, who couldn't log into the servers. Featuring a number of remarkably promising new technologies, version Alpha 3.18 may have been too complex to deliver a reliable experience early on, and players jumping in to give the new content a fair shake haven't had much luck.

Specifically, Star Citizen Alpha 3.18 has introduced Persistent Entity Streaming and Server Meshing, the combined functionality of which essentially allows the game to «store» placed overworld items for an essentially indefinite amount of time. Other notable additions include the entire gameplay loop that relates to salvaging, a wealth of new locations and events, and the introduction of vehicle racing, to name a few.

Star Citizen Releases Alpha 3.18 Update

Star Citizen has had a long and storied history of development, with its first playable portions launching in 2013. Version Alpha 3.18 is the next big step forward for the unique space-faring MMO, but its servers haven't held up. Players have been experiencing long queue times, an assortment of login errors, and serious progression bugs, all of which came to a head late on March 13, when the status of the server was escalated to «Major Outage.» Developer Cloud Imperium Games has alleviated these problems to an extent, but many issues caused by the launch of Alpha 3.18 are present still.

The introduction of Persistent Entity Streaming in Star Citizen was always going to be problematic, mainly due to the complexity of the feature itself. Being a persistent, always-online MMO, it's particularly important that things stay where they ought to be.