Over the past three weeks, players trying to get in to ARK: Survival Ascended have been having a lot of trouble, and we all have some likely very bored script kiddies to thank as the game’s server host has been the target of frequent DDoS attacks.
Problems first started to crop up on February 20th, when official EU servers were experiencing connection errors. Things were then quiet up until about a week later, when all official servers had connection issues.
After a few network restarts, Studio Wildcard openly admitted that “a severe, ongoing DDoS attack” that kept going through the entire week was at the root of the problem, forcing gradual server restarts and extensive downtime. As of yesterday, the studio has continued to report DDoS attacks are ongoing and may cause connection issues, and Wildcard has promised to protect player progress.
If that wasn’t bad enough, console versions of the survivalbox have had their own series of technical problems as well, with errors such as black screens when attempting to play on the Astraeos map. The PlayStaton version appeared to have its issue fixed fairly quickly, but Xbox players had to wait until yesterday – and perform a full power cycle on the console – in order to get things functional.
Last but not least, Epic Games’ online matchmaking services for ARK were experiencing issues of their own over the past couple of weeks, though that doesn’t appear to be related to the DDoS attacks on the official network.
