Battlestate Games’ multiplayer online shooter Escape From Tarkov has seen its servers struggle under what may be targeted attacks.
The issues began on December 28 (per dedicated site Tarkov News) and have been ongoing through to today (January 3). Players have experienced difficulty logging in or launching matches, not earning loot from in-game victories, and other problems.
The problems have largely coincided with a series of Twitch drops the developer has been orchestrating with a number of streamers, making for some confusion over whether the issues were down to overloaded servers struggling to cope with increased demand, or more malicious attacks.
However, in a tweet issued at 11 PM GMT on January 2, Battlestate Games said the server issues were “not related” to the promotional event. Later in the same thread, the developer pre-empted calls to upgrade its capacity by adding, “Some issues show themselves only under heavy load (like the one we’re currently experiencing) and ‘buying more servers’ won’t fix these issues.”
Dear players,
Our servers are currently overloaded, but this is not related to the Twitch Drops event we're running. On the release of Patch 12.12 we had more CCU and the backend was more overloaded than now #EscapefromTarkov
— Battlestate Games (@bstategames) January 2, 2022
Escape From Tarkov lead designer Nikita Buyanov later said on Twitch that “these kind of people or organisation are trying to make things worse by attacking our servers at the same time, and I wish them only the worst”, implying that the issues were caused by a deliberate attack.
Buyanov added that Battlestate is “do[ing] everything we can, we’re sorry for all the queues and stuff”, and that the team is “working on resolving this issue, because literally this is the one and only priority for us right now”.
