FIFA Ultimate Team on PS3 still down for some after two weeks

Football Ultimate Team, the immensely popular (and, for EA Sports, profitable) mode in FIFA 16, has been offline for some number of users on the PlayStation 3 for two weeks, with some players demanding answers and accusing EA Sports of neglectful treatment.

EA Sports acknowledges that on Nov. 20 it took the mode offline in order to repair the Football Ultimate Team economy for FIFA 16 on the PlayStation 3. Since then, however, EA Sports says the "vast majority" of players on that platform have been able to return. Some are still locked out as EA Sports completes its investigation of what happened and how it should be fixed.

A Twitter account set up by an angry player to call attention to the outage says the problem began when players were accidentally given 2 million coins (the in-game currency used to acquire players and other items) as a daily log-in bonus.

Must Read

EA looks back on five years of the FIFA Ultimate Team juggernaut

Polygon reached out to EA Sports to ask about the current numbers of affected players and when the matter would be cleared up entirely. An EA Sports representative referred us to the original post on the game's official forums.

EA Sports has been giving players other free, in-game items as a make-good for the downtime but says "a number of transactions affecting a small percentage of players" still need further analysis.

Ultimate Team, introduced six years ago, has frequently been a target of phishers, coin sellers and other schemes that are against the mode's terms of service, though this matter appears to involve an internal mistake that some took advantage of. This afternoon, EA Sports' official FIFA account was still telling players that developers were "still investigating some accounts on PS3."