Rockstar Games’ servers have been under heavy fire from massive DDoS attacks in recent days, causing widespread login and connectivity issues for players of GTA Online. These attacks come in the wake of Rockstar’s recent implementation of BattlEye, a new anti-cheat system designed to crack down on in-game cheating, sparking backlash from a segment of the player base. Protesters, unhappy with the new system, have resorted to using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to disrupt the servers, escalating tensions between the gaming giant and its community.
The actual cheaters completely bypassed the new anti-cheat in about 6 hours. They had to update their cheats a bit, but are otherwise essentially unaffected. Linux users, Steam Deck users, and people who don’t want to give a single game full hardware access, are all affected. None of those can play GTA:Online anymore, unless they mod the game to bypass the anti-cheat, which can be seen as cheating in itself, and could result in a ban.
The ddos attacks are likely being orchestrated by a small group of people or even an individual, it probably does not represent the vast majority of affected users.