According to KitGuru.net, Ubisoft has been forced to pull Rainbow Six Siege offline entirely following a major hack over the weekend. The attacker gained access to Ubisoft’s servers and, crucially, what appears to be the game-wide moderation system. From there, they distributed billions of free R6 credits to random players, issued false bans, and sent bizarre system messages globally. The immediate impact was so severe that Ubisoft not only took the game offline but also froze the entire skin marketplace. The company has stated it will roll back all store transactions from the period, meaning any skins bought with the fraudulent credits will vanish, and currency balances will revert. There’s no estimated time for the game’s return, with an update promised for next week.
The trust problem
Here’s the thing: this isn’t just a server outage. This is a catastrophic failure of internal security for a live-service game that’s nearly a decade old. Someone didn’t just steal data; they got the keys to the kingdom and started pushing buttons on a global scale. Think about the message that sends to players. Your progression, your purchases, your account standing—all of it was seemingly up for grabs by a single malicious actor. That erodes trust in a way a standard DDoS attack never could. And for a competitive shooter where fair play and account integrity are everything, that’s a huge blow.
Winners, losers, and rollbacks
So who wins and loses here? Well, the obvious loser is Ubisoft’s reputation for operational security. But financially, they’re probably making the right, if painful, call with the full transaction rollback. Letting billions of illegitimate credits flood the economy would destroy the value of their premium currency and the skin marketplace overnight. The “winners” who spent the free credits are just going to lose their ill-gotten skins. But what about the players hit with false bans? Or those who just wanted to play on their day off? They’re collateral damage in a mess they didn’t create. It’s a no-win situation that leaves everyone frustrated.
The bigger picture
This incident really highlights the immense, centralized power—and risk—in these always-online games. The entire global player base is dependent on a single point of control, and when that’s compromised, everything goes haywire. It makes you wonder about the safeguards, or lack thereof. Was it a phishing attack on an employee? An unpatched vulnerability? We’ll probably never get the full story. But for other live-service operators, this should be a five-alarm fire drill. If your game’s admin tools can affect every player at once, how many layers of protection are really in place? Not enough, apparently.
