Gears of War: E-Day hit by weekend DDoS attack

Gears of War: E-Day players were knocked out of matches over the weekend after its online systems were flooded with junk traffic.

Developer The Coalition said the shooter was hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a deliberate attempt to overwhelm servers with fake requests so real players cannot get through. The studio gave the update in a statement posted on X, as reported by Video Games Chronicle.

The problems showed up on Sunday. Players reported trouble joining multiplayer matches, with some connections dropping after they had already got into a game.

The Coalition said the attacks on its online services caused intermittent disconnects, login issues and other service disruptions. In plain terms, the game would let some people in, kick others out, and refuse to let a third group log in at all.

Its teams are continuing to monitor and mitigate the activity. That means filtering out the attack traffic while keeping the game playable for legitimate players, work the studio said was still under way.

The Coalition is the developer of Gears of War: E-Day and a flagship first-party studio within Xbox Game Studios, according to The Coalition. The studio says the Gears of War series has more than 50 million unique users, which helps explain why server trouble spreads fast when matchmaking stumbles.

For fans, this means the weekend faults were not a fault on home consoles or broadband. If logins failed or a lobby collapsed, the cause, according to the developer, was the attack on its side of the connection.