
Final Fantasy 14 North American Servers Hit by Power Outage, Not DDoS Attack
Final Fantasy 14 experienced a significant server disruption on January 5th affecting all four North American data centers. Initial reports and player accounts suggest the outage stemmed from a local power failure in Sacramento, likely caused by a blown transformer, rather than a DDoS attack. Service was restored within an hour.
Unlike previous incidents in 2024, where persistent DDoS attacks plagued the game, causing high latency and disconnections, this outage appears to be a localized infrastructure issue. Reddit users corroborated reports of a loud explosion in Sacramento, consistent with a power transformer failure, around the time of the server downtime.
The European, Japanese, and Oceanic data centers remained operational, further supporting the theory of a localized power problem. While the Aether, Crystal, and Primal data centers gradually returned to service, the Dynamis data center experienced a longer period of inaccessibility.
Square Enix acknowledged the issue on the Lodestone and confirmed that an investigation is underway. This latest incident adds to the ongoing challenges faced by Final Fantasy 14, particularly given the ambitious plans for 2025, including the anticipated launch of Final Fantasy 14 Mobile. The long-term impact of these recurring server issues remains to be seen.