The network hosting the role-playing video game Final Fantasy XIV experienced significant disruptions for three hours yesterday as the result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

A Feb. 5 posting on developer Square Enix’s online forum informed players that the company was able to fully restore the network and also reinforced its anti-DDoS defensive measures following the incident, which caused technical difficulties between 6:49 a.m. and 9:40 a.m. Eastern Time that day.

Earlier that same day, Square Enix acknowledged that gamers could be experiencing disconnections from and difficulties logging in to JP data center Worlds, as well as difficulties accessing, sending and receiving data from JP data centers.

In June 2017, Final Fantasy XIV was notably impacted by a multi-day DDoS attack campaign targeting the game’s North American data center.

“Online gaming companies are constantly under the barrage of DDoS attacks; sometimes there are dozens of attacks per day that range in size and scale,” said Stephanie Weagle, vice president of DDoS protection and mitigation company Corero Network Security. “Regardless of the motivation, or techniques used to execute the attacks, these cyber events lead to downtime, latency and availability issues… Any service downtime equates to drop-in visitors and a corresponding loss of revenue.”

Source: https://www.scmagazine.com/final-fantasy-network-recovers-after-losing-health-points-to-ddos-attack/article/742432/