A DDoS attack on EU servers in Final Fantasy 14 stopped players accessing the game throughout last night (August 14).
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Square Enix announced the attack last night on its website, stating: “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties because of a DDoS attack.” This attack limited players from logging in to Final Fantasy 14 and also booted players who were already in the game.
A DDoS attack, or distributed denial-of-service attack, involves flooding a server, service or network with an influx of traffic. Hackers typically use a chain of compromised PCs to launch the attack, creating an overwhelming level of requests that a server can’t keep up with.
This prompted the developer to look into the attacks and launch countermeasures. Roughly twelve hours later, Square Enix provided a further update stating that EU servers in Final Fantasy 14 had recovered from the attack. According to Square Enix, the attack caused issues by disconnecting players from games, not allowing players to login and also limited data transfer between players and servers.
The DDoS attack only affected the game’s EU servers, of which there are twelve. There are 24 servers in North America and 32 in Japan. A boost in popularity recently means that there are several servers which players can not create new characters in.
Players on the Final Fantasy 14 Reddit page were quick to react to the outage, voicing their frustrations towards those perpetrating the attacks. Reddit user NejatMolla posted: “This ruined my palace of the dead run. My entire week of freetime is gone. Reduced to atoms.”
Probablyonmobile was slightly more direct, calling into question the motivations of people who could DDoS attack an MMO: “It takes a special kind of sadness to find any satisfaction in DDoSing an MMO. DDoS attacks always seemed like a no-life thing to do. DDOS attacks that would simply boot people from a game seems even more so.”
Elsewhere, Nintendo’s The Legend Of Zelda: Skyward Sword remaster was the best-selling game in the US throughout July. The HD remaster included updated visuals, an improved control scheme and Amiibo support.
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