Battlefield 3 servers under DDoS attack; DICE ‘working around the clock’

The multiplayer servers for EA’s hit shooter Battlefield 3 are not fully functional due to a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack.

Developer DICE is attempting to counter the attack by updating and improving its servers. In posts on its message boards, DICE says it doesn’t know why its game is under attack, and it will continue to work to get the game working properly.

“We have been working around the clock to mitigate the impact of an ongoing denial-of-service attack on our Battlefield 3 game infrastructure over the last several days,” reads a post from the DICE team. “While the motives are unclear, the focus of the attack has been interference with network communications preventing access to multiplayer gameplay.”

We’ve reached out to EA to ask if it knows who is responsible for the attack. We will update with its response.

The studio went on to assure fans that this blunt-force attack has not compromised user data.

A DDoS attack is when a person or a group of people use software to make repeated requests on a server. If enough requests are made, it will overwhelm the server and cause it to begin spitting out errors. It doesn’t require any hacking skills, but a coordinated attack like this does need a lot of different PCs all running the software at the same time.

That suggests this is either a group of people or that someone is hiding the code for the attack in other software.

“As a part of our efforts to resolve these issues, we’ve conducted rolling restarts of Battlefield infrastructure to apply some updates,” the Battlefield forum post reads. “Thank you for your patience and support while we work to get everyone back and playing Battlefield 3 as soon as possible.”

DICE promises to provide more updates as it makes progress.