Final Fantasy XIV - Barraged With DDoS Attacks

Final Fantasy XIV's servers have sustained a barrage of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.  Nobody knows who's responsible, or why they're doing it.

Earlier today, reports surfaced that Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn has been under attack from a Direct (correction: Distributed) Denial of Service (DDoS) assault. A post on the game’s official site confirms the attacks, but assures players that no character or personal information has been compromised.

According to the official post, the game’s servers have been hit by “an anonymous third-party” for several days, which has affected login to the game servers in North America and Europe. To clarify, a DDoS is a targeted attack that, as the official post explains, “attemp[s] to increase the server load to an extensive level by flooding the network of the targeted servers using a massive number of computers.”

DDoS attacks are somewhat commonplace for most high-profile online systems; World of Warcraft‘s expansion launch faced a similar attack last weekend. They are usually resolved quickly, but this time around the attackers have apparently been changing their methods constantly to thwart attempts to block them from overloading the servers.

Square Enix apologized to players for the interruptions, and has assured everyone that they will “continue to monitor and work on recovery from every possible angle.” No word yet on who may be responsible for the attacks or what their ultimate goal may be.

More information.