I'm getting a similar response from the game as back at launch when it was deleting progress, say it ain't so?

I never had a character deleted, but I always exit the online via the option in the pause menu, which is what they said to do in the beginning to avoid the bug. Maybe it fucks up if you try switching to a single player character or by shutting off the game. Or maybe it has to do with your autosave settings.

No it's none of those. Back at launch the game was making online characters vanish if you tried to get online while the servers were bugging out. Much like then I was trying to get on and the game was dropping me to single player, trying again brought up a notification telling me that if I wanted to edit my appearance, this was the time.

I'm pretty sure if I'd said yes that my progress would have been wiped as that was one of the ways to have it happen at launch.

Fortunately I managed to get on early this morning although as I've said to them, an event where I can't get on most of the time and have the threat of wiped progress (and that when finally on fails to drop the supposedly special crates) is a failure.