Ubisoft Claims Server Downtime Was Due to External Attack

Yesterday, Ubisoft‘s Digital Rights Management servers for Assassin’s Creed II were down for over 10 hours, preventing many players from accessing the game at all.

Ubisoft has told Eurogamer that the downtime actually only affected 5% of their player base and was caused by attacks on their server from an external source. 

From Eurogamer:

“Ubisoft would like to apologise to anyone who could not play ACII or SH5 yesterday,” the company said in a statement this afternoon.

“Servers were attacked and while the servers did not go down, service was limited from 2.30pm to 9pm Paris time [1.30pm – 8pm GMT].

“95 per cent of players were not affected, but a small group of players attempting to open a game session did receive denial of service errors.”

In case you don’t pay attention to this sort of thing, we would remind you that Assassin’s Creed is not an MMO, or even an online game, but rather a single player title.  In what is largely seen as a draconian and futile move to combat piracy, Ubisoft requires players to have a constant online connection to their DRM servers in order to use the game.  This is, of course, contingent on your own internet connection, and the availability of Ubisoft’s servers.

Public reaction to Ubisoft’s policy was widely negative, and is unlikely to improve following this latest latest interruption in service during the first week of the Assassin’s Creed II’s release.

Eurogamer via Rock Paper Shotgun