Ping 999 and “server not responding”: is it the game or you

Signs of an outage at the game

• The problem started for everyone at once: friends, the clan chat and the developer's social accounts all say the same thing at the same time.
• Websites and other games open as usual, but in this one sign-in fails, no match is found or the server answers with an error.
• The publisher's status page shows an incident, or some services are marked as down.
• The in-game ping shows a ceiling value like 999 — that is not a measurement but a sign that there is no answer from the server at all.

In all these cases there is nothing to fix at home: reinstalling the game, changing DNS and rebooting the router will not help, because the problem is on the other side. The only useful action is to find the official status page and wait.

Where to check server status

Epic Games

Epic's status page: for Fortnite it has separate lines for sign-in, matchmaking, voice chat, the store and game services.¹

Electronic Arts

EA's server status page lists Apex Legends, Battlefield 6, Battlefield 2042 and other EA games.²

PUBG

In its connectivity guide, PUBG support sends you to check the current server status on the PUBG Support account on social media.³

Valve games

We found no separate official status page for CS2 and Dota 2. Third-party Steam status sites do not belong to Valve, and they cannot be cited as official.

Community servers

In Rust, DayZ, Squad and Arma Reforger every server is its own story: check the server browser and the server owner's channel.

Status links and game pages: Fortnite · Apex Legends · Battlefield 6 · Battlefield 2042 · PUBG: Battlegrounds · Counter-Strike 2 · Rocket League

Signs that the problem is on your side

• Only you are lagging, and the team plays fine.
• It is bad in every game at once, not in one.
• The ping -t command to your router or to a stable host on the internet shows loss or spikes — so the problem is already on your part of the path.
• Everything is steady over a cable, and over Wi-Fi there are spikes and loss.
• It gets bad at the same time every evening — a busy ISP node.

A separate case is an outage at your ISP: websites do not open, the internet on your phone does not work over home Wi-Fi, but over mobile data everything is fine. Then a call to the ISP is more useful than any setting.

What to do in each case

1. An outage at the game: wait and watch the status page. Do not reinstall the game and do not change settings — once it is restored, everything works again on its own.
2. A problem at home: a cable instead of Wi-Fi, a router reboot, downloads and streams paused on every device. Check the result by the network stats in the game.
3. A problem at your ISP: call with specifics — the ping and pathping results, the time and the address to which packets are lost.
4. A problem on the route to the game server — loss and spikes appear only beyond your ISP: this is the leg SLARP works on. It routes the game's traffic through its own network, picks the route to the server and optimizes ping and jitter. If the outage is at the game's own servers, it will not help — and every game page says so.

A ping of 999 in the game itself is usually a placeholder: the game gave up waiting for an answer and shows the ceiling value. The real latency can be anything, so for diagnosis look at the loss and at the ping command's replies, not at that number.