What's Happening With Final Fantasy 14's DDOS Attacks

Square Enix has been dealing with some pretty difficult issues in Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the game itself, but everything to do with DDOS attacks administered by third-party disruptors.

Recently, heading into the weekend, Square Enix posted up a notice on the official Final Fantasy XIV website. The notice explained why there were server issues coming out of the tail end of June and heading into the early half of July. The post also explains why there are continued intermittent connectivity issues still playing Final Fantasy XIV's online service.

The notice explains that since mid-June the networking team have been desperately trying to deal with the third-party DDOS attacks. After finally being able to secure Final Fantasy XIV, the team then ran into a much larger problem: the ISPs were being DDOS'd.

The attacks on the upper-tier ISP networks has caused lapses in communication between the service operation and Final Fantasy XIV, which has resulted in gamers not being able to get in and play the game as intended.

Square has been working with the upper-tier ISPs in order to address this issue. It's still ongoing so if you're having trouble playing the popular MMO then that's probably the reason why. According to Square Enix, the measures have so far been effective but it suspects that the attacks could occur again, so the publisher is still working with the ISPs to keep measures in place to thwart potentially incoming attacks.

Back at the end of June, Square had another post on the official website, explaining that there were network attacks caused by a third-party and that various steps were being taken to address the issue. In the previous post, however, it was reported that the attacks initially began as far back as June 16th, and have been ongoing ever since.

The anonymous attacks have mostly centered in on attacking the North American data center. These denial of service attacks have been plaguing the gaming community for quite some time. Throughout 2014, the attacks were especially prevalent, with groups like the Lizard Squad going steadily after the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live. Other services such as Blizzard's Battle.net was also targeted.

The attacks were frequent and annoying and caused a lot of gamers great frustration, especially when the Lizard Squad aimed to take down gaming services on Christmas morning, ruining many a Christmas celebrations as kids who opened up their brand new games couldn't play them online.

In this case, the attacks have been going on for almost an entire month, but Square and the ISPs have managed to fix the problem for now. The attacks basically started right around the time Final Fantasy XIV was patched and brought up to version 4.0 in preparation for the Stormblood release. New areas were added, new fields were added, new cities, quests, character classes and events were also included into the game.

Hopefully these issues don't persist any longer than they already have so gamers can get back to enjoying the latest expansion pack for the game, _Stormblood. _