Players are having trouble connecting to PsyNet, the online network for Rocket League, for the April 7 debut of Season 3. Various groups have been reporting connection problems, as well as issues with matchmaking and the item shop, claims which are supported by Epic Games.
Season 3 incorporates a slew of new Rocket League content. Some of it is gated behind the latest paid Rocket Pass, like a new car - the Tyranno - and an assortment of cosmetic upgrades. Rocket League is also getting promotional content from Formula 1 and NASCAR, a Trade-In section built into the Garage, and a few under-the-hood technical improvements, most notably the ability to sync account-based settings to the cloud. Nintendo Switch players will have to wait for a later update to get sync functions, and it's unknown when that patch might go live.
An official Rocket League Status tracker on Twitter indicates that matchmaking services should be back online, but that the Trade-In option is temporarily disabled. In fact, items acquired by players may not appear for up to 15 minutes, which has caused some frustration amongst the fanbase on social media. The situation is a bit vaguer on the Epic Games status page, where "game services" are identified only as having "degraded performance," and the item shop is supposedly fully functional. Epic does say it's investigating the downtime, a process which began around 15:32 UTC, or 10:32 AM Eastern.
There's no word yet on when technical difficulties will be resolved. Since Rocket League is an enormously popular game, it may simply be buckling under the number of simultaneous connections. If so, the situation could return to normal within a day or two. If not the culprit could be Season 3's associated client-side and/or server-side updates, which might demand extra time to fix. That's unlikely, so the game should be back in action in 24 hours, and most likely a fraction of that time.
A similar problem affected the launch of Rocket League Season 2 in December 2020, killing online access completely when as many as 1.3 million people were trying to play. Users even reported similar problems with item access. Rocket League first hit 1 million simultaneous players in September 2020, over five years after launch. It has the advantage of being a truly cross-platform game - while the PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch are very different in some respects, their driving controls are similar enough that no one system is superior except in terms of performance.
Source: Rocket League Status/Twitter, Epic Games