Eternal loading into the match

There has been an influx of players complaining about the "infinite loading screen" problem as well as connection problems over the course of a month. Judging by the recent messages posted on various forums about Apex Legends, it appears that many Russian players are affected by these problems, but similar complaints are also coming from Saudi Arabia, Germany (Deutsche Telekom ISP), the Netherlands, and other European countries, just to a lesser extent. This is how they describe their recent multiplayer experience:

• Infinite loading screen, cannot get into a match. Get sent back to the lobby with a code:net error and a message that the connection to the server has timed out.
• Cannot get into a match 9 times out of 10. In the rare event that the player finally gets into a match, either they can play until the end but cannot return to the lobby (infinite loading screen again) or they get serious packet loss (up to 80% and even 100% in some cases) and end up getting kicked into the lobby.
• In order to play a match that is 2-20 minutes long, the player has to waste 20-30 minutes on futile attempts at establishing a connection, most of which result in an error. Code:net or code:leaf.

Please note that I am not experiencing these issues myself, but I believe it is important to report the experience of other users here. Not all of them speak English fluently, and some of them are not going to bother singing into the EA forums in order to report these issues, they prefer to complain on other forums instead (such as the Steam Forums for Apex Legends).

Some people started running into those issues exactly a month ago, after March 27th. Others started to report connection problems and infinite loading screens about 3 weeks ago and 2 weeks ago. The intensity of such complaints has spiked over the course of the last 5 days. Coincidentally, the dates of increases in these complaints seem to match the dates of update releases, especially the recent "Urban Assault" collection event released on April 23 in Europe (5 days ago).

People are confused, and many of them cannot make heads nor tails of what is happening. Some people blame EA, believing that the issue is on their end. Others blame faulty routing from the Apex servers to their ISPs. Russian users are especially worried that these issues may be the result of the Russian communication & media regulators restricting access to the websites of major cloud hosting providers in April, such as aws.amazon.com, godaddy.com, and digitalocean.com. However, so far these measures have been taken just against the information resources (websites), not the infrastructure that actually hosts servers (this is the case with Amazon AWS). There are users from Russia who can play without any issues at all, and there are also those who have fixed the issues by getting an external static IP, changing their ISP, or using their cell phone as a fallback connection device.

Here are a few solutions that are reported to work at the moment, according to the users who experienced these issues:

• Contact your ISP and ask them to give you an external static IP address.
• Contact your ISP and ask them to disable the NAT.
• Use the mobile phone as a hotspot and tether the cell phone connection.
• Reboot the router or change the DNS server.
• Use a VPN connection and bear with the latency increase and/or sudden lag spikes.

Dear EA Support, do you know if there is anything that has been changed on the game's back end recently? People did not have to get external static IPs to play the game just a few weeks and even a few days ago. Some of them use VPN services to finally get a stable connection out of desperation, and using a VPN connection resulted in players getting their entire accounts banned in the past (the latest incident occurred just a few days ago, there is a topic started by a user from the Chinese mainland who used an accelerator to solve their connection issues and got a ban as a result).  Could you look into this issue, especially the problems players from Russia and Saudi Arabia have recently faced? Also, are there new issues with routing to the Deutsche Telekom ISP? In case there is nothing that can be done about the recent problems, could you loosen the policies regarding gameplay through a VPN connection?

On a side note, do you know if the game uses Amazon AWS for hosting the servers people play on, by any chance? Judging by articles from the past, Apex Legends used to rely on Unity Multiplay and Google Cloud, but that might not be the case now.