Social media was bursting today with gamers around the world complaining about how they were unable to access many popular games on the Electronic Arts network. Christmas eve was going to be more plain than you might have imagined if you had plans to fire up an EA game and have fun with your gamer buddies. Luckily, the problem has been resolved now.
The big guys at EA acknowledged the server outage a few hours ago. Electronic Arts tweeted twice about the problem today:
Apologies for the inconvenience. We’re working hard to resolve log in and connection issues which are currently affecting many game titles.
EA is currently experiencing an outage. EA games, services & support may be impacted. We’re working to resolve as fast as possible.
The games that were experiencing this outage included popular titles like Madden NFL 16, Star Wars: Battlefront and Titanfall. The issue most users were reporting were related to log in and establishing connection.
A few hours later, the account tweeted with good news:
EA games & services are available. Support wait times may still be impacted. For 1×1 assistance, please contact us: http://bit.ly/contactEA
The company has declined to comment on the reason for the problem.
Hackers recently have had a sort of tradition to try and take down gaming networks over the holiday for the past few years now. We saw Microsoft’s Xbox Live go down for 24 hours last year and Sony’s PlayStation suffered a similar fate for almost two days. The attacks were basically distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) when malicious actors lob massive amounts of digital requests at a service through a network of addresses in order to disrupt access for legitimate users.
The nature of the outage faced by EA is, as of yet, unknown. But our best guess is that it was just the tradition being carried forward.
