Rainbow Six Siege is under siege by hackers, Ubisoft forced to take all servers offline — players randomly received billions of credits, ultra-exclusive skins, and bans or unbans

Rainbow Six Siege
(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Ubisoft has been forced to take all Rainbow Six Siege servers offline after the game was hacked by unknown entities. The company confirmed on X at around 9:10 AM EST on Saturday, December 27, that there was an incident with the title, with its Service Status page reporting an Unplanned Outage across all platforms as of the time of writing. While the company is yet to acknowledge what caused the disruption, there have been numerous reports of players receiving 2 billion R6 credits and Renown, as well as developer-only skins and Glaciers — one of the rarest weapon skins in the game. There have also been claims of random bans and unbans, affecting everyone from ordinary players to high-profile and streamer accounts.

Because of the ongoing chaos, players have been advised to stay offline, especially as it seems that this is more than just a simple hack. Instead, it looks like it’s a massive breach with Ubisoft losing total control of the game’s backend. The company has yet to explain what is happening, especially as it’s likely still trying to figure out what’s going on and how it can regain control of the game, but this silence has led to frustration among players. Still, it’s likely fighting one fire after another, so we don’t expect it to make any announcements anytime soon.

Rainbow Six Siege

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

While we don’t know the extent of the damage yet, it’s advisable for anyone with a Ubisoft account, especially one tied to Rainbow Six Siege, to change and update their passwords as a precaution. In the meantime, there’s nothing we can do except wait. While there have been larger, more damaging hacks in the past, this is one of the first instances in recent history where an apparent breach has taken down an entire game.

The last big game hacks we remember were in 2011, when the bad actors attacked the PSN and made off with data from 77 million accounts. Online services for the PS3 and PSP were taken down, and it took Sony over a week to explain what happened. Steam was also a victim of a cyberattack in the same year, with hackers potentially stealing information from over 35 million users. However, those attacks weren’t as brazen as the ones we’ve seen today, with the people behind them giving away billions of credits and skins, as well as trolling the ban service as if they’re taunting Ubisoft with the amount of control they have.

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Jowi Morales
Contributing Writer
  • JoeGonsales
    The technical and reputational damage here is immense. Even after a fix, how do you restore trust? A rollback will anger those who got (and spent) free stuff. Not rolling back destroys the game's economy. A no-win scenario. This will be a case study in live-service security failures.
    Reply
  • moon2
    Ah in fairness, no one is going to be actually annoyed at a rollback. Those who got 27 bajillion in game currency definitely expect it's going away.

    A rollback is a straightforward win for everyone. The reputational, technical and (probable) fines stemming from the breach will be the bigger issue.
    Reply
  • LordVile
    JoeGonsales said:
    The technical and reputational damage here is immense. Even after a fix, how do you restore trust? A rollback will anger those who got (and spent) free stuff. Not rolling back destroys the game's economy. A no-win scenario. This will be a case study in live-service security failures.
    Remove any currently held and gift everyone a token amount
    Reply
  • HyperMatrix
    Wish they had done it to Battlefield 6 instead. Still banned for no reason and awaiting a response to my appeal for over 30 days.
    Reply
  • Amdlova
    Pvp online games? It's a big no no...
    Cheater on a Pve game sucks but Pvp It's madness.

    The last online game I have played PVP It's quake 3 at milennials ago.
    Reply
  • thisisaname
    moon2 said:
    Ah in fairness, no one is going to be actually annoyed at a rollback. Those who got 27 bajillion in game currency definitely expect it's going away.

    A rollback is a straightforward win for everyone. The reputational, technical and (probable) fines stemming from the breach will be the bigger issue.
    Indeed no one is going to be surprised if "27 bajillion in premium in game currency" worth millions in real world currency gets removed, but they might get annoyed.
    Reply
  • moon2
    Getting into an argument about semantics is not worth it. Just pointing out that "people will get annoyed if they don't get to keep hacked currency" is a silly argument however you want to dress it up:)
    Reply
  • DS426
    I just don't feel bad one bit for Ubisoft. Terrible ethics, work culture, treatment of gamers... You light enough fires and something big is liable to burn up.
    Reply
  • qwertymac93
    Telling someone to reset their password now is likely not only a waste of time, it may be impossible. As is the recommendation to "stay offline". Firstly, the game itself is offline right now: players don't have a choice. Secondly, the hackers have administrative backend access, they don't need you to be online to mess with your account. Do you think Ubisoft needs you to actually be playing the game for them to ban you or add items to your account? Thirdly, If everyone tries to needlessly reset their Ubisoft password when there's no evidence the Ubisoft primary service has been breached (only the Rainbow 6 Siege game servers have been confirmed), the servers will just get overloaded and the resets might not even go through.

    In all likelihood, the breech will be found, the game will be rolled back, and everyone will get some free trinkets as a mea culpa for the downtime.
    Reply
  • thisisaname
    moon2 said:
    Getting into an argument about semantics is not worth it. Just pointing out that "people will get annoyed if they don't get to keep hacked currency" is a silly argument however you want to dress it up:)
    Yes it is a silly argument (I was going for a statement:giggle: ) that people would get annoyed if they do not get to keep their hacked currency but people get annoyed for very silly reason, some even get unreasonably angry.
    Reply