Ubisoft takes 'Rainbow Six Siege' offline after significant hack

Ubisoft shut down the servers for Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege X for more than 24 hours after suffering a massive systems breach over the weekend. Hackers reportedly gained access to the first-person shooter's servers, giving away in-game currency worth millions in real-world value.

Videos and screenshots of the Rainbow Six Siege X hack began circulating on social media over the weekend, with multiple players noticing that they suddenly had rare in-game items and an extra 2 billion R6 Credits on their accounts. R6 Credits are in-game currency that can only be purchased with real-world money, and is used to buy new playable characters or cosmetic items. The Ubisoft Store sells 15,000 R6 Credits for $99.99, meaning 2 billion would be worth over $13 million.

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Several players also reported seeing highly unusual in-game notifications while playing Rainbow Six Siege X, further hinting that something was afoot. Pop-up notifications ostensibly displaying the names of users being banned instead relayed messages such as "What else are they hiding from us?," "All work and no play makes me a dull boy," and the lyrics to 2000's hit song "It Wasn't Me" by Shaggy. 

"The ban ticker was turned off in a past update," wrote Rainbow Six Siege X's official X account. "Any messages seen were not triggered by us."

Ubisoft first acknowledged the hack just after 9 a.m. ET / 6 a.m. PT Saturday morning, with Rainbow Six Siege X's X account posting that it was "aware of an incident" impacting the game and was "working on a resolution." Less than two hours later, it announced that both Rainbow Six Siege X and its Marketplace had been shut down white they worked to fix the issue. The Marketplace is an official platform on which users can trade in-game items with each other.

The game subsequently remained offline for over 24 hours, with Ubisoft's next update at around 12:30 p.m. ET / 9:30 a.m. PT on Sunday stating that it was in the process of rolling back the game to a previous state. It would also be conducting "extensive quality control tests" to check that the issue had been resolved and no accounts had been compromised.

Ubisoft finally announced that it was slowly bringing Rainbow Six Siege X back online at around 7:30 p.m. ET / 4:30 p.m. PT on Sunday, eventually declaring it reopened to all players two hours later (though you may experience delays as servers ramp up again). As of writing, the status page on Rainbow Six Siege X's official website still lists the game down globally, with unplanned outages across all of its platforms. Exactly how unauthorised actors gained access to Ubisoft's servers has not yet been officially confirmed.

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If you already went on a Rainbow Six Siege X shopping spree with your unexpected R6 Credit windfall, the good news is that you won't be penalised. Ubisoft states that players will not be banned if they spent the credits they received. However, you won't be able to enjoy your in-game purchases for long. All transactions which took place after 6 a.m. ET / 3 a.m. PT on Dec. 27 will be reversed, with the Marketplace to remain closed "until further notice as investigations continue."

Unfortunately, this will likely impact some legitimate purchases as well, Ubisoft noting that some players may temporarily lose access to a few of their in-game items. Such issues are expected to be corrected over the next two weeks.