Final Fantasy 14 Servers Experience Major Issues

Final Fantasy XIV North American Servers Suffer Brief Outage: Power Failure Likely Culprit

A recent server outage impacting all four North American data centers of Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV) on January 5th, around 8:00 PM Eastern, appears to have stemmed from a localized power issue rather than a DDoS attack. Player reports on social media suggest a transformer explosion in the Sacramento area, where the data centers are located, caused a power disruption. Service was restored within an hour.

This incident contrasts with the numerous distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that plagued FFXIV servers throughout 2024. DDoS attacks, which flood servers with bogus traffic, resulted in high latency and disconnections. While Square Enix implemented mitigation strategies, completely preventing DDoS attacks remains a challenge. Players have sometimes used VPNs as a workaround.

The January 5th outage, however, points to a different cause. Reddit discussions on r/ffxiv cite eyewitness accounts of a loud explosion in Sacramento, consistent with a blown transformer, preceding the server downtime. The Europe, Japan, and Oceanic data centers remained unaffected, further supporting the theory of a localized power problem. While the Aether, Crystal, and Primal data centers quickly returned to service, the Dynamis data center experienced a slightly longer outage.

Square Enix acknowledged the issue on the Lodestone and is currently investigating the cause. This latest setback adds to the ongoing server challenges for FFXIV, even as the game prepares for ambitious projects in 2025, including the launch of a mobile version. The long-term impact of these recurring server problems remains to be seen.