Ubisoft claims an “attack” on its servers resulted in the failure Assassin’s Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5 DRM over the weekend, but says that only a very small percentage of its users were actually affected by the outage.
Ubisoft’s servers failed around 8 am GMT yesterday and were reportedly down for more than ten hours, during which time owners of Silent Hunter 5 and Assassin’s Creed 2, released in Europe last week, were unable to access their games. Naturally, owners of the games were not happy about this turn of events, in no small part because it’s exactly the sort of nonsense that was predicted would happen when Ubi first revealed its “always online” DRM plans.
Confusion reined during the crash, even among the company’s own representatives, but Ubisoft is now claiming that its servers were actually attacked over the weekend, leading to the trouble. “Ubisoft would like to apologize to anyone who could not play AC2 or SH5 yesterday,” the company said in a statement.
“Servers were attacked and while the servers did not go down, service was limited from 2:30 pm to 9:00 pm Paris time [1:30 pm – 8:00 pm GMT],” the statement continued. “95 per cent of players were not affected, but a small group of players attempting to open a game session did receive denial of service errors. All players with an open session during the attack were not affected.”
The company also maintained that despite reports to the contrary, its hot new DRM system hasn’t yet been cracked, adding, “We also confirm that, at this time, no valid cracked version of either Silent Hunter 5 or Assassin’s Creed 2 are available.”
The DRM servers are reportedly back on but Ubisoft is still apparently suffering from problems of some sort: As of 10 am EST on Monday, the Ubi forums, including this official “DRM problems” thread, are only available on a very intermittent basis.
Assassin’s Creed 2 comes out in North America tomorrow.
Source: Eurogamer
Published: Mar 8, 2010 03:12 pm