This guide is meant to help you either solve your problem or create a proper thread explaining your problem so people have a chance helping you.

Connection Problems can be caused by roughly three things:

1. You - your hardware, your software, your settings, those you live with or just plain you
2. The Middleman - your internet service provider (ISP), the parts of the internet between you and EA
3. EA - EA's software, hardware, human error, DDOS attacks, lack of available bandwidth etc.

Hardware always eventually breaks, software can always get corrupted, so everything will eventually go down at some point.

Now lets get to it!

Before blaming everybody else, make sure you have tried to see if you are the problem. While you check if you are the problem make sure to list down all the things you have checked and how you have checked as this will make it 1000 times easier for others to help you should you need help.

Things you should always try before doing anything else:

• Log out, restart, log back in.
• Power off and remove the power cord from all your networking equipment and the system you are gaming on and wait 5 minutes. It doesn't matter that all other games and software work fine, an error can easily affect only 1 game or application while the rest still works.
• Check EA's websites and communication channels for service messages - http://help.ea.com and EA's Twitter accounts are a good place to start. Also check if others have reported similar issues in forums before posting there.
• Be patient. Most connection problems are temporary. Do the power off step mentioned above and go get a drink and see if things are fine before posting anything.

Things you should always mention if you create a post/thread about your issue:

• Your platform (PC, PS4, XB1 etc.)
• Detailed list of what and how you have tried to solve the issue, including the things mentioned in the "Things you should always try before doing anything else" section above
• Details about your network setup (cable/wifi? speeds? routers? etc.)
• Have it worked before? When did it stop working? Did you do something before it stopped working? (mention exact times)
• Are you having trouble with anything else that could be connected?
• Is anything/anyone else using the internet while this happens?

Issues here are hard to fix but they normally fix themselves. If you are a more advanced computer user and want to help fixing the issue faster consider adding trace-routes to your posts about connection issues, how to do this can be seen here: http://help.ea.com/en/article/ping-traceroute-and-uo-trace/

If EA is having issues and you have checked that YOU aren't the problem there's a few things you can do to help expedite the issue:

• Mention your country and ISP
• Help rule out you as the problem by providing the information requested in 1. You + 2. The Middleman
• Don't make duplicate posts, do you see a post about the same issue use the "me too button" and post in that thread.

/ Thanks for reading this guide by Carbonic, feel free to PM me about improvements to the guide (not about connection problems) 😉