Final Fantasy game servers hit by multiple DDoS attacks

Players of the popular video game series Final Fantasy have had trouble logging in this week due to a series of ongoing DDoS attacks flooding its servers with a large volume of junk traffic.

The first attack on Final Fantasy 14 started on Monday and lasted over 24 hours, impacting players around the world. At that time, the game’s publisher, a Japanese company Square Enix, said that it was “investigating the attack and taking countermeasures.”

However, the attacks renewed on Tuesday and were still ongoing on Wednesday, causing players difficulties to log in and leaving some European, North American and Oceanic data centers inaccessible.

Square Enix hasn't attributed the attack to any hacker group. “Additional information will be provided as the situation develops,” the company said.

“I’ve been kicked out of the game yesterday a few times. I hoped I didn’t get any penalty for it,” one of the game’s players wrote on Reddit.

“Whenever I select a character, I get an error 90002 and get kicked out. Throughout the entire day, I can't load any characters. All other things on my PC work perfectly fine, and all the troubleshooting stuff doesn't resolve the issue,” another user complained.

A 90002 error usually appears when there is a connection issue or interference with the game's servers.

The DDoS attack on Final Fantasy came ahead of the release of the new expansion called Dawntrail. The expansion is now available for pre-order before the official release in July.

During the previous release in 2021, the game publishers experienced difficulties serving a large number of players. At one point, the number of simultaneous logins reached the hardware limit, causing users trouble logging in. Gaming media expects that this could also be an issue during the upcoming release.