Regarding Recent Instability on North America

Hey Everyone,

Over the last couple of days, many of you have experienced some problems while playing the game. You’ve seen reconnect spikes, issues with game starts, and very large login queue in many occasions. We wanted to take some time to give you all a little more information on what’s going on, since we haven’t spoken much about this since the issues started occurring.

In the last couple weeks our datacenter and game have been the target of some DDOS attacks. The results of these attacks have caused instability in our service. We’ve been experiencing large attacks that have been filling up a significant chunk of bandwidth and causing parts of our system to lose connection to each other. The end result is a poor play experience for you all. While we’ve been able to turn on our loss forgiven feature as soon as the attack is detected, this does not equal a good play experience.

While we can’t share the details of the work we are doing internally to combat this (since it would give the attackers information to circumvent it), we want you to know that we are tackling this from many different angles. This includes working with our datacenter and internet service provider partners, as well as developing tools and services internally to make our service more robust against these types of attacks. Defending against DDOS attacks is an arms race that we will always be engaged in, and we are committed to reducing the pain you all feel as swiftly as possible when the service is being impacted by malicious attacks.

We want you to know that this is the top priority for the Live Services team. We share your frustration at the impact of these attacks, and we are working to make sure you can play the game every time you want to.

-Ryan