An ongoing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack targets Bohemia Interactive’s infrastructure, preventing players of DayZ and Arma Reforger from playing the games online.
Bohemia Interactive is a Czech video game developer and publisher known for its popular Arma Series tactical shooters and DayZ, a standalone survival game from an Arma 2 mod.
Starting last Friday, players of Bohemia’s games started experiencing server connectivity issues that prevented them from playing online.
On Monday, the game publisher acknowledged the problems, apologizing to the community for the disruption and asking for patience as they work to resolve the issues.
However, as of writing, the problems persist, and the community’s patience is running thin, with many asking for refunds and accusing Bohemia of not being transparent enough.
Yesterday, Arma Platform announced on X that they are still working on a resolution, stating, “We are doing everything in our power to get all of you back in-game as quickly as possible.”
However, the post did not contain any timelines or specifics about the situation, and they refuse to share details as to what is happening, only adding that “we cannot divulge details about the issue or the specifics of our efforts.”
Previously, Arma Platform suggested that players facing connectivity errors set up local battles with AI enemies, a proposal that didn’t resonate well with many of the players.
The DayZ community remains equally impacted, despite its efforts to restore functionality by setting up “experimental servers” earlier this week.
The previous advice to restart community servers to resolve any issues was retracted yesterday, as this was found to be causing inescapable loops.
At the time of this writing, the Bohemia Interactive website is not functioning, displaying an error stating, “Whoops, looks like something went wrong.”
Ransom DDoS attack rumored
Although Bohemia Interactive remains silent on what exactly is causing these persistent problems, users on Reddit have reported that DDoS attacks are behind the outages.
A group named ‘styled squad reborn’ has taken responsibility for this ongoing DDoS attack, although their involvement is unconfirmed.
“DayZ players! BI has been making false promises to you for several years, haven’t you noticed that?,” the threat actors stated on X.
“We want to see drastic changes in the company’s games, as well as in the company itself.”
Unconfirmed rumors of the attackers demanding a ransom payment to stop the attack suggest a financial motive. However, the attackers later claimed the Bitcoin demand was a joke.
Others, though, mention that the motive is political/ideological, with hacktivists targeting Bohemia to protest their portrayal of war crimes in the games, particularly in Ukraine vs. Russia servers.
However, with Bohemia Interactive refusing to confirm what is behind the network outages, it is unclear what exactly is happening.
BleepingComputer contacted Bohemia Interactive about the outages and will update this story if we get a response.