Posted on April 15, 2020 at 12:27 PM
Major EA Servers Down After DDoS Attack
Almost 24 hours after the Electronic Arts servers were attacked, the platform has not been able to get its gaming system up and running. The DDoS attack affected Battlefield, Apex Legends, and BFL games, which are EA’s other titles. FIFA 20 is also among the servers currently struggling with issues of outage since the attack occurred.
Down Detector, an independent observer of downtimes has received constant reports from gamers all over the world regarding the outage of EA servers. With the current outage, it’s unclear when the affected servers could come back online.
Players who tried to log into the servers were shown error message that reads, “Online logging is currently unavailable”. If they try again, they are sent to the offline mode.
EA has not provided full details about the situation. But the company released a statement, explaining that the issues the servers are facing are a result of a professional and sophisticated DDoS attack.
According to EA’s tweet, “Today we experienced a series of DDoS attacks that we’ve now been able to resolve.” The tweet further informed users still facing login issues to contact the firm.
The DDoS attack occurred yesterday on EA’s servers. However, gamers are still having issues with the network, which shows it hasn’t been fixed yet.
EA said it’s hoping to resolve the issue quickly to get everything back online. The issue from the attack started yesterday. But an hour later, the issues were believed to have been resolved. However, the problem resurfaced again and EA is still struggling to find a solution.
Although EA has given users assurance that it’s handling the situation, it seems it will take a longer time before the servers could return to their full operations online.
DDoS attacks increasing in recent times
Although DDoS attacks have been a menace to online businesses for a long time, it seems their activities on networks and servers only recently increased. DDoS attack is an attempt by cybercriminals to overload network or server with bogus requests. This act causes the network to crash.
The actors using this type of attack make use of botnets and create fake traffic. With the creation of fake traffic, it overwhelms the network and makes it very difficult for the network to carry out its standard commands. As a result, the users of such service or network are denied access with error notifications.
Attackers taking advantage of lockdown
The COVID-19 lockdown has kept individuals indoors. Online gaming platforms have recorded an increased amount of users as a result of the situation. Gaming enthusiasts are also giving more time to competitions and tournaments online.
With this new surge in online gaming activities, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the situation to disrupt these platforms. It’s not yet clear what the DDoS attackers hoped to achieve, but EA says it’s investigating the situation.
Meanwhile EA has not yet stated when the affected games will be available online. The company said it will inform the users as soon as the situation is resolved.
DDoS attack on EA not the first time
This type of attack is usually common in the video game industry. The hackers utilize multiple machines to log in to the targeted servers simultaneously.
It’s not the first time a DDoS attack was launched on EA servers, and it may not be the last. Apart from the attack, servers are gradually being overloaded because of the influx of gamers in this period of lockdown. Even if EA DDoS protection service was able to hold off the attack, the increased number of gamers that load the network would have made it difficult.
Most of these attacks are from hackers looking to find security flaws or players who are unhappy about gaming outcomes. Sometimes these attacks are from anonymous hackers who are just looking for attention.
