A major server outbreak struck Final Fantasy 14 on 5th January, causing all four North American Data Centers to go offline for a brief period just after 8:00 PM Eastern. Players took a social media to speculate that the disruption stemmed from a power outage in the Sacramento area that was triggered by a transformer failure.
Luckily, within the initial hours of the reports, the servers were restored and fixed. This indecent came out as another chapter where a technical difficulty was faced by Final Fantasy 14.
Throughout 2024, the servers of the game were frequently assaulted by Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attacks. Players experienced major latency and disconnections as a result of these regular attacks that flooded them with false data packets.
A flawless solution remains unclear despite the implementation of several measures to balance the impact of these attacks by Square Enix. Gamers have discovered that making use of a virtual private network or VPN can occasionally help them improve their connection.
Despite the history of DDoS attacks, this recent server issue grew from a different cause. The users on the r/ffxiv subreddit renounced their in-game activities just before the servers went down.
In response to the post by a Reddit user dunphy_Collapsable, Sarikitty, another user mentioned that a loud explosion or popping noise was heard in Sacramento. Sacramento is the home to the North American Data Centers.
Other users echoed this observation and suggested that it was likely the sound of a blown transformer. It is assumed that this explosion could have led to the power outage that impacted the data centers. The outage was soon reported after 8:00 PM Eastern with the servers coming back online somewhere about an hour later. Square Enix later issued a statement on the Lodestone in which the issue was acknowledged and it was confirmed that an investigation about the same is underway.
