Final Fantasy XIV North American Servers Suffer Major Outage: Power Outage, Not DDoS
A significant server outage impacted all four North American data centers of Final Fantasy XIV on January 5th, starting around 8:00 PM Eastern Time. While the game has faced numerous distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks throughout 2024, evidence suggests this outage stemmed from a localized power issue, not a cyberattack.
Reports from players on social media and the r/ffxiv subreddit point to a power transformer failure in Sacramento, California, where the NA data centers are located. A loud explosion, consistent with such an event, was reported around the time of the outage. The servers returned to service approximately an hour later. Square Enix acknowledged the issue on the Lodestone and confirmed an ongoing investigation.
The Europe, Japan, and Oceanic data centers remained unaffected, further supporting the theory of a localized problem. Restoration was gradual, with Aether, Crystal, and Primal data centers coming back online before Dynamis.
This latest incident adds to the ongoing challenges facing Final Fantasy XIV, particularly concerning server stability. The game's ambitious plans for 2025, including the launch of a mobile version, will undoubtedly be influenced by these persistent server issues. The long-term effects remain to be seen.
