Madden 20 Online Franchise League servers taken offline until further notice

EA has disabled Madden 20’s Online Franchise League servers until further notice. The next status update comes Tuesday.

For those keeping track, Madden 20’s Online Franchise mode has been a bit of a mess lately. A server update to prepare for Title Update 9 earlier this week exposed a problem with Franchise data. Those interested in the details can read up it over on EA’s forum post from last week, but to make a long story short, it ultimately resulted in a larger issue that prevented some users from connecting to their online leagues.

For the past week or so, EA has been working to fix these issues, but to no avail. Today, EA took more drastic steps, disabling all Online Franchise Leagues until further notice. EA explained in a post today that a server-side fix rolled out to address the initial issue resulted in Franchise servers locking up. To prevent it from spreading to all Madden servers, which would’ve impacted all game modes, they have gated off Online Franchise and have taken the servers offline.

"Yesterday, our teams attempted to roll out a server side fix to address the issue where some Online Franchise Leagues were unable to login. After the fix was rolled out, we noticed that the Franchise servers started to lock up. Late last night, a decision was made that we had to gate all of the Franchise Online modes to prevent all the Madden servers from locking up, which would have impacted all game modes."

At this time, no one is able to log in to their Online Franchise and it doesn’t seem that the servers will be brought up any time soon. EA assured fans that they are “actively working” on the problem in an attempt to find a solution, but until then, users are only able to play Offline Franchise and QB1 (or Ultimate Team).

The next status update regarding the Online Franchise servers won’t come until Tuesday, November 12, which seems to suggest that the problem will take longer than the weekend to fix. I suppose it’s possible it could be fixed before then, which would be great news, but it seems pretty telling that EA gave a specific date for the next status update.

In all my years of being a Madden player, I can’t ever recall a situation as bad as this one. The Madden series has always had its fair share of glitches and bugs — Madden 20 is riddled with them — but this is probably the first time I’ve seen where an entire portion of the game is disabled. I suppose a part of that is the growing shift towards online play, but it’s simply inexcusable.

It’s bad enough that Connected Franchise Mode has been ignored for years while EA focuses on Ultimate Team, but this is undoubtedly an all-time low for the Madden series. Suffice to say, players aren’t very happy with this news.