The lobby server connection has encountered an error

[vmj2324]

This just happen to me, I guess I'm going to have to wait and log in later on.

[Will2057]

Same here, pretty much since the drop at 4:00am. I've made it past and into the queue once, with a 1470 wait, which dropped to about 500 before kicking me out again. Pretty frustrating, but I get that EVERYONE wants into this game!!! It's just that, I do too

[KatraSiena]

Same for me.

[geekgirl101]

1 hour later went from 3.6k to 175 and got slammed with "the lobby encountered an error" and the client shut down. Now stuck behind a 4.6k queue and gonna have to wait another hour for it to go down to 500 before I may or may not see that error again, this is gonna get real old especially if this is all I'll see for the entirety of my "prelaunch" payment.

[Woody84uk]

Ohh the joy's of patch day's made it from 4k+ to just 4th in que now back to 6k+ hopefully get some play time before my new working week tonight. Don't mind the que but que to crash to re que to crash is grinding to say the least

[Ryan_Zilla]

That is happening to a LOT of people because of the insanely high numbers of people trying to log in. The Launcher is slow to give people the play button also. Then if there are a lot of people trying to get to the 'LOBBY' from the start screen, you might get the 2002 error. If you get lucky and make it to the character screen, you'll end up in a login queue. And sadly, can even get an error and get disconnected from that, which means needing to load the launcher again. I got the lobby error a couple of times once I finally got the play button. Finally got in to the character screen, had a queue of 2835. Got down to 1783 and got disconnected. Luckily, I got back in and hadn't lost any ground in the queue and just made it in after 50 minutes total waiting, so have hope!

This is all not unexpected, Yoshi said it could happen in his post on Lodestone on 11/29 concerning congestion for Endwalker's Launch/Early access.

I dont think there is a good reason to not be able to join the queue when other players are in the queue or in the game.