Summary
On January 5,Final Fantasy 14experienced a major server outage, as all four North American Data Centers went briefly offline shortly after 8:00 PM Eastern. According toFinal Fantasy 14players 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.
This latest incident is not the first timeFinal Fantasy 14’s servers have endured major technical problems. Throughout 2024,Final Fantasy 14’s servers were consistently targeted bydistributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which sent false packets of information to the servers and overloaded them. During a DDoS attack, Final Fantasy 14 players would experience higher latency than normal, making the game unplayable and causing server disconnects. While Square Enix has utilized 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 workaround to improve their connection.
AlthoughFinal Fantasy 14has been the target of DDoS attacks, this latest server problem was caused by a different circumstance. According to posts on the r/ffxiv subreddit, users shared what they were doing in-game before servers went down. In a reply to a post by Reddit user dunphy_Collapsable, another user named Sarikitty stated that a loud exploding or popping sound was heard in Sacramento, whereFinal Fantasy 14’s North American Data Centers are housed. Other Reddit users confirmed that the sound was consistent with a blown power transformer, which could have caused a power outage that affected the nearbyFinal Fantasy 14data centers. The outage was reported shortly after 8:00 PM Eastern, and servers came back online an hour later.Square Enix released a statement on the Lodestoneto confirm the issues and stated that the matter is under investigation.
Final Fantasy 14’s North American Data Centers Return From Major Outage
The Europe, Japan, and Oceanic data centers were unaffected, adding weight to it being a localized server outage. At the time of writing,Final Fantasy 14’s North American Data Centerswere slowly coming back online, starting with the Aether, Crystal, and Primal Data Centers. The Dynamis Data Center, which is the newest ofFinal Fantasy 14’s data centers, remained inaccessible.
AlthoughFinal Fantasy 14has ambitious plans for 2025, including the launch ofFinal Fantasy 14 Mobile, the server issues are the latest trial the game had to overcome. Only time will tell what the fallout of the ongoing server issues will be.
