Final Fantasy 14 servers are experiencing major issues

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Summary

  • Final Fantasy 14's recent server outage in North America was likely caused by a power outage, not a DDoS attack.

  • Players experienced server outages affecting all four NA data centers.

  • Square Enix is ​​currently investigating the matter.

The 5th of January Final Fantasy 14 experienced a major server outage, as all four North American data centers went down shortly after 8:00 PM Eastern. According to Final Fantasy 14 players on social media, the server issues were likely caused by a power outage in the Sacramento area due to a transformer blowing out before returning online within an hour of initial reports.

The latest incident is not the first time Final Fantasy 14s servers have had major technical problems. Throughout 2024, Final Fantasy 14s servers were consistently targeted by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which sent bogus information packets to the servers and overloaded them. During a DDoS attack, Final Fantasy 14 players would experience higher latency than normal, rendering the game unplayable and causing the server to disconnect. While Square Enix has used mitigation techniques to deter 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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Even if Final Fantasy 14 has been the target of DDoS attacks, this latest server issue was caused by a different circumstance. 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 a post by Reddit user dunphy_Collapsable, another user named Sarikitty stated that a loud exploding or popping sound was heard in Sacramento, where Final Fantasy 14s North American data center exists. Other Reddit users confirmed that the sound was consistent with a broken power transformer, which could have caused a power outage that affected the nearby Final Fantasy 14 data center. The outage was reported shortly after 8:00 PM Eastern, and the servers came back online an hour later. Square Enix released a statement on Lodestone to confirm the issues and stated that the matter is under investigation.

Final Fantasy 14's North American data center returns from major hiatus

The data centers in Europe, Japan and Oceanic were unaffected, adding to the importance that it was a localized server outage. At the time of writing, Final Fantasy 14s North American data centers slowly came back online, starting with Aether, Crystal and Primal Data Centers. Dynamis Data Center, which is the newest of Final Fantasy 14s data center, remained unavailable.

Even if Final Fantasy 14 has ambitious plans for 2025, including the launch of Final fantasy 14 mobilethe server issues are the latest test the game had to overcome. Only time will tell what the outcome of the ongoing server issues will be.

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