Final Fantasy XIV North American Servers Suffer Major Outage; Power Outage Suspected
A significant server outage impacted all four North American data centers for Final Fantasy XIV on January 5th. The disruption, beginning around 8:00 PM Eastern, lasted approximately one hour. While DDoS attacks have plagued the game throughout 2024, player reports and social media discussions strongly suggest this incident stemmed from a localized power outage in Sacramento, California, where the NA data centers are located. Reports of a loud explosion, consistent with a blown transformer, coincided with the outage's onset.
This event differs from previous widespread connectivity problems attributed to DDoS attacks, which overloaded servers with false information packets, resulting in high latency and disconnections. While Square Enix employs mitigation strategies against DDoS attacks, these remain difficult to completely prevent. Players have sometimes used VPNs as a workaround to improve their connection during these attacks.
The European, Japanese, and Oceanic data centers remained unaffected, further supporting the theory of a localized issue. The restoration of service was gradual, with Aether, Crystal, and Primal data centers returning online before Dynamis. Square Enix acknowledged the problem on the Lodestone and confirmed an ongoing investigation.
The incident adds another challenge to the game's ambitious 2025 roadmap, which includes the anticipated launch of Final Fantasy XIV Mobile. The long-term impact of recurring server issues remains to be seen.
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