Ranked is routing me to ap-east-1 despite having ~60ms to ap-southeast-2

Question

I'm located in Australia and have recently started having a strange server routing issue in Apex Legends.

Normally I get around 60ms to both:

ap-southeast-1

ap-southeast-2

Recently, however, my data centre ping has changed:

ap-southeast-2: ~60ms

ap-southeast-1: ~200ms

The bigger issue is that Ranked matchmaking is putting me into ap-east-1 (East Asia) servers, despite manually selecting an appropriate SEA/OCE data centre.

What's especially confusing is that ap-southeast-2 is still showing ~60ms, so I clearly still have a normal low-latency route to the region. My general internet connection also appears completely normal.

This seems like it could be an issue with Apex's data centre routing, Ranked matchmaking, or routing/peering between Australian ISPs and EA's servers.

Has anyone else in Australia been experiencing this recently? Is there a known issue with SEA/OCE routing or Ranked matchmaking?

This has been occuring for about a week now and makes Ranked basically unplayable.

Any help is appreciated.

xmart0 · Answer

I did some digging and found out that the underwater ASC (Australia–Singapore Cable) has been damaged since the 4th of September 2026. This is affecting international connectivity, particularly the Perth–Singapore route, which could explain why we're experiencing higher ping when trying to connect to SEA servers. Basically the screenshot says we are being rerouted causing more latency.

As for your routing and matchmaking issue, I believe EA may be putting you into those lobbies to get you into games faster and fill squads when you're solo queueing, despite having a specific server selected.

I notice pretty often that even when I'm connected to Sydney, I still end up playing with players from SEA, so it wouldn't surprise me if something similar is happening here.

The best workaround for now would be to play pubs on OCE servers when you can get a good-ping lobby, or try ranked on US West if you're willing to deal with ~200+ ping.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an official update on how long the cable repairs will take yet, so we're probably stuck dealing with the routing issues until the affected cables are repaired. Next update is on the 18th of September 2026 so we will have to see,

To check just search Vocus outages and search ASC in the search bar on the website (EA forums won't let me post links)