A system and method are provided for sticky routing of a user's service requests and connections to a distributed service hosted by multiple data centers. Sticky routing data are generated when a user first connects, to include member ID, preferred data center, a user bucket associated with one data center, a generation of the bucket, a generation of the user's sticky routing data, and timing information identifying a time of issue and/or a time of expiration of the routing data. A user bucket is either online (accepts new users; their requests are routed to the associated data center), offline (not accepting new users; existing users are expelled and must join a different bucket), or closed (not accepting new users; existing users' requests continue to be routed to the associated data center). All of a user's requests, from all devices, are thus routed to one data center, based on member ID.