Star Wars: The Old Republic

Star Wars: The Old Republic launched in December 2011 as BioWare's attempt to bring the studio's strength in narrative RPG design to the MMO format — and while it never came close to displacing World of Warcraft, it delivered on the storytelling ambition in ways few MMOs had attempted. Eight class stories, each with full voice acting and BioWare-style companion relationships, gave SWTOR a narrative depth that set it apart from the genre. The game transitioned from subscription-only to free-to-play in 2012, which expanded the player base and shifted the commercial model toward the Cartel Market for cosmetics and quality-of-life unlocks. EA transferred the game to Broadsword Online Games for ongoing development and operations in 2023.

SWTOR runs on dedicated server infrastructure with a single North American server — Star Forge — and a single European server — Darth Malgus — following multiple server merges over the game's lifespan. The reduction to two servers means that a single server incident affects the entire playerbase of that region rather than a subset on one world. The Cartel Market — the in-game cosmetics and item shop — processes Cartel Coin purchases and delivers items from the Cartel Market directly to player accounts through the mail system. Flashpoints (group dungeons), Operations (raids), and PvP Warzones all run as instanced content on the server, with the instancing system able to fail independently of the open world.

SWTOR server problems are highly visible to the community given the small number of active servers. The launcher fails to authenticate BioWare/EA accounts during backend degradation, presenting a login error before the character select screen is reached. Server crashes take the entire regional population offline simultaneously, and the launcher's server status indicator switches from a green bar to a red "offline" state. Instanced content — particularly Operations in progress — fails to save group loot correctly when the instance server restarts mid-run, resulting in loot that was won during the run not appearing in player inventories. Cartel Market transactions occasionally fail mid-purchase, charging Cartel Coins but not delivering the purchased item.

Outage.gg tracks Star Wars: The Old Republic server status using real-time community reports from PC players. If SWTOR servers are down, the launcher is failing to connect, or the Cartel Market is inaccessible, the live status page shows current player impact.