EA Restores A Limited Number Of Madden Cloud Franchises, Others Lost For Good

EA has restored a limited number of Madden 23 cloud saves that were corrupted in December but confirmed that others are completely lost and unrecoverable.

Since Madden 23 launched in August last year, many players have reported issues with the game’s Franchise mode while others have lost saved data due to the faulty cloud services. Some players were locked out of the leagues because of this problem and although a fix arrived on December 15, another issue appeared days later. This bug made it so an unknown number of player-made leagues were permanently deleted, with no way to get them back.

However, it looks like EA has finally been able to help some players with the issue. An email sent to select players–via MillsTwitch on Twitter–explained that after Franchise cloud saves corrupted some leagues during a 10-hour window on December 28, the team began investigating and working to recover the missing leagues.

EA confirmed that it determined that roughly 2% of the total number of existing leagues were impacted, but “for those leagues that accessed during the incident window, the majority resulted in an unrecoverable state.” It’s worth noting that though 2% sounds low, it’s more likely that frequent players were affected disproportionately, as infrequent players were naturally less likely to have logged on during the timeframe in which the saves were corrupted.

“Today, the team restored a limited number of Franchise saves via a backup,” the email reads. “Unfortunately, those are all the available leagues that can be restored,” the email reads. “For players looking to restart their league, a Week 17 ‘Play Now’ Live roster went live last week with another Wild Card update available now as a starting point.”

Additional information provided in the email showed the causes of the issue, due to a “highly unlikely set of combined circumstances leading to file server storage reaching max capacity, unutilized legacy code corrupting accessed leagues, while at the same time process errors led to almost all available backups getting deleted in an attempt to correct the original problem.”

EA acknowledged that this shouldn’t have happened and is now working on a Commissioner Tools feature set for future Madden titles, allowing Franchise users more control over their franchises. Plus, those affected by the issue will receive an invite to access the Madden NFL 24 closed beta–only for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S–and all Franchise players who lost progress will receive a 50% discount on Madden NFL 24.