It looks like someone might have a bone to pick with Square Enix: Final Fantasy 14 has been hit by yet another DDoS attack on its servers today. Following the attacks on March 2 and April 12, 2024, this is the third DDoS in as many months.
Unlike the previous attacks—which focused on FF14’s European and Oceanian servers—this DDoS attack has caused a global outage across the board. Every single regional data center started experiencing connectivity issues at 8am CT, which continued for an hour and a half before the official forums confirmed the cause of the issue.
Normally, DDoS attacks on FF14 are limited to one region—a global service interruption is the largest scale DDoS attack that the game has been hit with in many years, if not ever. For North American players, this will be the first DDoS-related outage since August 2022. So far, it looks like players are having trouble logging in or staying logged in for more than a few minutes before getting hit with connection error 90002, making it impossible to complete any instanced duties.
The attack comes just before the maintenance scheduled for the evening of May 6, blocking players from getting anything done before the nine hours of downtime that rolls right over into the next reset for weekly challenges and rewards. For many, this was also one of the last chances to finish the FF15 crossover event, The Path Infernal, before it ends the day after maintenance.
The 2024 DDoS attacks have been spaced out approximately one month apart with increasing severity and show a somewhat worrisome pattern with the release of Dawntrail just around the corner. Another worldwide DDoS attack during launch week—when the servers will already be dealing with abnormally high traffic—might spell a disaster even worse than the login calamity of Endwalker’s launch.
