Final Fantasy XIV North American Servers Suffer Major Outage: Power Outage, Not DDoS
A significant server outage impacting all four North American data centers of Final Fantasy XIV occurred on January 5th, shortly after 8:00 PM Eastern. Initial reports and social media discussions suggest the cause was a localized power outage in Sacramento, California, potentially resulting from a blown transformer. Service was restored within an hour.
This incident differs from the numerous distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that plagued the game throughout 2024. DDoS attacks, which flood servers with false information, caused high latency and disconnections. While Square Enix employed mitigation strategies, these attacks proved difficult to completely prevent. Players often used VPNs to mitigate the impact of DDoS attacks on their individual connections.
The January 5th outage, however, points towards a physical infrastructure problem. Reddit users reported hearing a loud explosion or popping sound in Sacramento, consistent with a transformer failure, around the time of the outage. The Europe, Japan, and Oceanic data centers remained unaffected, further supporting the theory of a localized power issue.
Square Enix acknowledged the outage on the Lodestone and confirmed an ongoing investigation. At the time of this writing, the Aether, Crystal, and Primal data centers have returned to service, while the Dynamis data center is still undergoing restoration.
This latest challenge comes as Final Fantasy XIV prepares for ambitious plans in 2025, including the launch of a mobile version. The long-term consequences of these recurring server issues remain to be seen.
Latest Downloads
Downlaod
Top News
