Forum Discussion

Rising Rookie

Re: FC 26: Routing through USA causes 1000 ms ping spikes

Hello EA Support Team,

I’m located in Portugal, and I’m playing EA Sports FC 25 on PC and experiencing severe input delay and unstable connection in EA Sports FC 26.

After multiple tests, I discovered that my game sessions are being routed through data centers in the United States instead of the expected European servers.

Diagnostics performed:

- Direct connection (no VPN, no background apps).
- Different ISPs and DNS (Google, Cloudflare).
- Traceroutes consistently show traffic from EU → US → EA servers.
- ExitLag and NoPing confirm the same routing path.

Here is a concise WinMTR trace while connected to EA FC servers (personal IPs removed for privacy):

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| 104.28.0.0 - 0 | 350 | 350 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 2 |
| 172.68.101.1 - 0 | 350 | 350 | 3 | 6 | 20 | 4 |
| 198.41.160.34 - 5 | 350 | 332 | 10 | 16 | 28 | 14 |
| 198.41.140.232 - 38 | 350 | 217 | 95 | 95 | 97 | 95 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|

This clearly shows that connections from Western Europe are being routed via US nodes, causing latency spikes and input delay.

Please escalate this to the network infrastructure team to verify the routing configuration for EU players.

Thank you for reviewing this — ensuring fair competitive conditions for all players is crucial.

If needed, I can provide multiple WinMTR logs and connection captures at different times of the day — all showing the same US reroute pattern.

Kind regards,

Cristiano

2 Replies

lp_soldier6
Seasoned Rookie
2 months ago
I can confirm the exact same issue from Germany. My traffic is also being routed through Ashburn, Virginia (US) instead of any EU server (e.g. Frankfurt or Amsterdam), which leads to extreme input delay and ping spikes up to 1000 ms.
It’s not an ISP problem — I’m on Deutsche Telekom, but players from many different countries and providers are reporting the same routing pattern. Other online games run perfectly fine, so this is clearly something on EA’s side or their peering agreements.
The worst part is that this happens regardless of time of day, so it’s not related to peak congestion.
EA publicly promised improved server infrastructure and better connectivity for FC 26 in Europe — but routing EU players through the US is the opposite of that. This needs to be escalated to EA’s network and infrastructure team, not Tier 1 support.
Thank you, Cristiano, for posting proof. The more of us speak up with traceroutes, the harder it is to ignore.
https://forums.ea.com/discussions/fc-26-technical-issues-en/fc-26-routing-through-usa-causes-1000-ms-ping-spikes/12767859
dreig94
Rising Novice
2 months ago
does the game shows regular ping on screen while this happens ?