A few days after the launch of “Return of the Ancients,” the developers of Path of Exile 2 are struggling with a major issue caused by a small hotfix.
What a failure was this? Path of Exile 2 struggled with unexpected server issues on the evening of June 3, 2026. The reason for this was a small hotfix, as reported by the Grinding Gear Games team.
The hotfix led to countless players being unexpectedly disconnected from the online services or suffering from drastically degraded server performance. Overall, it took about 70 minutes for players to be able to play undisturbed again.
This is what the developers say about the incident: In a statement on the Path of Exile website, the developers say that the internal tech team noticed a higher crash rate shortly after the hotfix was applied and subsequently decided to withdraw the patch via rollback to protect the players and server stability. However, this backfired.
The studio explains that the rollback failed catastrophically, as the faulty hotfix generated a massive amount of crash dumps. These files are normally used for error analysis but are now said to have filled up all server storage space. Additionally, the write operations of the files reportedly severely degraded server performance, making even the rollback of the update extremely slow.
The developers openly admit in the statement that the sheer amount of data completely overwhelmed the systems: “We have never experienced such a failure before and were completely unprepared for it,” the report states.
This is how the problems occurred: As the subsequent investigations by the developers showed, a missing data file related to the passive skill tree in the hotfix triggered the issues. This caused every player who possessed a radius jewel that covered the area of the skill tree, where new nodes were added, to crash the server.
The developers want to learn some lessons from the “unprecedented failure.” For one, crash dumps should no longer be able to completely fill up the servers’ hard drives. Additionally, they want to ensure that any necessary rollbacks can be performed more quickly in future hotfixes.
Another battle that Grinding Gear Games is fighting is balancing the Vaal Temple. Even in the current season “Return of the Ancients,” the development team had to respond with nerfs because players found ways to set up the temple to generate way too much loot. More on this here: Path of Exile 2 is now reducing loot for players, admitting they went overboard
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