Payday 3: is Matchmaking broken? How to check when the servers are fixed

While everything seemed to be stable enough during the early access period of the game, it seems like a massive influx of players on release day has caused the Payday 3 servers to implode and go down in fire. Now, would-be heisters are being forced to lay low in their hideouts while the developers at Starbreeze Studios try and bring the matchmaking servers back up to allow people to play.

While the launch day itself saw some problems and instability, the early morning of day 2, Friday 22, presented an increasing amount of matchmaking issues where most players reported not being able to find a match and play. The official Payday 3 account on Twitter/X announced that their team was working to restore functionality.

What do the Payday 3 server issues mean?

As it currently stands, no one can actually play Payday 3. If you open up the game, you’ll be presented with the following error screen, revealing a “Nebula Data Error.” Nebula is Starbreeze’s own account service, and as the game is built with the requirement of being always online to authenticate players and presumably avoid cheating, a service outage means that players can’t even log into their accounts and mess around with their loadouts, vendors, or even their local settings.

Since every version of the game is capable of crossplay, that means that they all share the same servers. Unfortunately this also means that you won’t be able to bypass matchmaking problems by trying other platforms.

How to check Payday 3′s server status to see if it’s online

There is currently no official way to check for server status for Payday 3. This means that if you want to find out when you’ll be able to play the game, you’ll have to keep your eyes on social media.

The developers have been communicating and announcing the ongoing issues and measures being taken through their Twitter/X page, so you can try following them there to get a notification of when matchmaking will be back online.

If you prefer to find out through the community, and at the same time hear everything going on with the game and other players, try the game’s subreddit. The community typically posts announcements, and openly discuss everything surrounding the title there.

Payday 3 is currently available for purchase on PC (via Steam and Epic Game Store), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Aside from these ongoing issues, we think the game is a fantastic foundation when compared with the previous games in the series, and have been having a ton of fun with it. Don’t forget to take a look at our full review right here.