Game-breaking service bug after update
I want to document a serious, update-induced bug in SimCity BuildIt that has affected my city and, judging by recent threads, many other players as well.
What happened
Immediately after a recent update, my city developed persistent service errors:
- Buildings showed red lightning / repair / service icons despite large overcapacity
- City view and edit view were often inconsistent
- Service problems followed buildings when moved
- New buildings sometimes worked, old ones stayed broken
- Repair / service states became “stuck” and never resolved naturally
This was not caused by roads, coverage, or insufficient capacity.
All core services (Power, Water, Sewage, Garbage, Fire, Police, Health) were clearly sufficient.
EA Support experience (7 attempts)
I contacted EA Support seven times.
- Every response was generic
- They repeatedly sent irrelevant guides (freezing, reinstalling, clearing cache)
- They never escalated to a technician
- They completely ignored the fact that this was a data corruption / state bug
- One case was even closed without resolution
Support simply does not understand this issue and refuses to treat it as technical.
The actual technical problem (important)
This is not a coverage issue.
It is service-state corruption at building level, introduced by the update:
- Global service systems are fine
- Individual buildings have corrupted service flags
- These flags do not reset automatically
- Normal gameplay cannot fix it
What EA needs to do to fix affected cities
For existing cities, the only real fix is:
A server-side reset of building service states / flags
(or a forced full service reinitialization per city)
Anything else is just deflection.
What finally worked (player-side nuclear option)
With help from ChatGPT, I did what support never suggested:
- Moved factories and shops out of the city
- Deleted all roads
- Deleted all services
- Deleted all residential buildings I could
- Left only unsellable buildings (Omega / Epic / task-related)
- Closed the app and waited
- Rebuilt the city from zero, extremely slowly:
- One service at a time
- One house at a time
- Long pauses between actions
After this total teardown and controlled rebuild, the city is finally stabilizing again.
New buildings behave normally, services are consistent, and the city appears “saved”.
This should never be required in a live-service game.
Conclusion
- This bug is real
- It is widespread
- EA Support is not equipped to handle it
- Players are being forced to destroy their cities to recover
EA needs to:
- Acknowledge this as an update regression
- Escalate cases to actual technicians
- Provide a server-side fix for affected cities
Until then, players are on their own.
If you’re experiencing similar behavior, you are not doing anything wrong.
