‘Destiny 2’ Has Been Unplayable For A Week Due To DDoS Attacks

Destiny 2 is in the middle of one of its worse crises in its history. No, not something involving players complaining about boring seasons or broken loot. Rather, Destiny 2 is quite close to unplayable, and it has been for a solid week, due to DDoS attacks that Bungie has confirmed. A rarity, given that they almost never say publicly such attacks are happening.

Bungie has not been able to get control of these attacks, where you can play the game for a spell, as it’s not usually fully offline, but you never know when you’re going to get kicked out, whether you’re about to down a raid boss or secure a kill to make it to the Lighthouse. It’s so frustrating many players have opted not to play at all (myself included) until this is resolved. And it’s unclear when that will happen.

If you want a visual representation of how bad this is, take a look at the playercount line on this Steamcharts graph of Destiny 2. It dips in bizarre ways showing off how unstable the DDoS attacks have made the game.

If this isn’t painting a picture for you, take a look at what a normal game not running into any server problems looks like with this same playercount line. Just standard peaks and valleys like a heartbeat based on the times when people play the most. But if Destiny 2’s line was a heartbeat, the patient would be dead.

We simply don’t know how long this will go on, and some players are mad that Bungie doesn’t have better security in place to prevent them. There are even conspiracy theories that this is Bungie’s own “broken server tech” which is a deeply stupid idea as Bungie is not going to lie about that, and they badly want to get the game back online as fast as possible to avoid bleeding players. Their own tech they could have fixed by now, but as you can see from that chart, this is absolutely an ongoing attack they’re constantly fighting back against. And no uh, dedicated servers would not fix this.

DDoS attacks are notoriously hard to combat, and it’s even harder to find the culprit. Bungie has been suing everyone and anyone for harming their game and community and employees in various ways, from cheaters to copyright strikers to serial harassers, but this is doing more damage to the game itself than anything else, and it’s one of the worst server situations I’ve ever seen in the game. And we’ve been through quite a few. While DDoSers occasionally do get found and prosecuted, this almost never happens in the gaming space itself for multiplayer servers being targeted, so I don’t know if justice is going to end up served here. The best they might be able to hope for is just stopping this attack for good, somehow.

This is a rough situation. Players can just move on for the time being and play one of the other thirty good games that came out this year, but Bungie is scrambling to fix this. Hopefully they can soon. Reset’s tomorrow.

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