summary
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The recent Final Fantasy 14 server outage in North America was likely caused by a power outage, not a DDoS attack.
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Players experienced server outages that affected all four NA data centers.
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Square Enix is currently investigating the matter.
On January 5, Final Fantasy 14 A major server outage was experienced as all four North American data centers went offline shortly after 8:00 PM ET. according to Final Fantasy 14 Players on social media said the server problems were likely caused by a power outage in the Sacramento area due to a blown transformer before coming back online within an hour of initial reports.
This recent incident is not the first time Final Fantasy 14's servers have endured major technical problems. During 2024, Final Fantasy 14's servers were constantly targeted by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which sent malformed packets of information to the servers and overloaded them. During a DDoS attack, Final Fantasy 14 players will experience higher latency than normal, rendering the game unplayable and causing server disconnections. While Square Enix has used mitigation techniques to prevent the effects of DDoS attacks, there is no effective way to stop them. Players can use a virtual private network (VPN) as a solution to improve their connection.

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Although Final Fantasy 14 Targeted by DDoS attacks, this latest server issue is caused by a variety of circumstances. According to posts on the r/ffxiv subreddit, users shared what they were doing in the game before the servers went down. In response to Reddit user dunphy_Collapsable's post, another user named Sarikitty stated that a loud explosion or pop was heard in Sacramento. Final Fantasy 14North American data centers are located. Other Reddit users confirmed that the sound was consistent with a blown power transformer, which could have caused a power outage that affected the surrounding area. Final Fantasy 14 Data centers reported the outage shortly after 8:00 PM ET, and servers were back online an hour later. Square Enix released a statement on Lodestone to confirm the issues and said the matter is under investigation.
Final Fantasy 14's North American data centers return from major outage
European, Japanese and Oceanic data centers were not affected and were added due to local server outages. at the time of writing, Final Fantasy 14North American data centers slowly came back online, starting with Ether, Crystal, and Primary data centers. Dynamis data center which is the newest data center Final Fantasy 14Data centers remained inaccessible.
Although Final Fantasy 14 It has ambitious plans for 2025, including launching Final fantasy 14 mobileserver problems are the last test that the game has to overcome. Only time will tell what the ramifications of the ongoing server issues will be.