Rainbow Six Siege Online Again After Temporary Shutdown Due to Marketplace Breach

Hacking Incident Results in Excessive Credit Awards and Rare Skins for Players

Ubisoft was compelled to take the Rainbow Six Siege servers offline and reverse transactions following a massive breach. This breach astonishingly equipped players with vast quantities of in-game credits and ultra-rare weapon skins, while also resulting in some unexpected account bans. As of December 28, the game's official status page was still indicating an 'unplanned outage' affecting servers across all major platforms, including PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.

However, by that evening, a status update from the company indicated they had completed testing on an update meant to rectify the issue and were reopening access to the servers. They also confirmed the completion of transaction reversals, although they noted the Marketplace would remain unavailable temporarily.

Timeline of the Incident

The situation began on a Saturday morning when Ubisoft publicly acknowledged an ongoing issue that was impacting Rainbow Six Siege. The team swiftly initiated actions to resolve the problem. Shortly thereafter, the servers were taken down, a decision preceded by numerous user reports of inconsistencies—from having either no credits or exorbitant amounts to unusual access to rare skins, and sporadic account bans or unbans.

Later, Ubisoft reassured players via a social media platform that there would be no bans for spending these acquired credits. Instead, they planned a comprehensive rollback of all transactions commencing from precisely 6 AM Eastern Time on that Saturday.

Ubisoft's Response and Measures

By Sunday, Ubisoft communicated that they were implementing the rollback while simultaneously conducting extensive quality assurance checks. These checks aimed to preserve the integrity of users’ accounts and guarantee the effectiveness of the corrective changes. The company emphasized the sensitive handling of this issue, acknowledging the lack of a precise timeline for when the servers would be fully operational again.

This narrative has been updated to reflect that Ubisoft has now reopened the servers following these security and restoration efforts.