Technology & Science
Hackers Force 24-Hour Global Shutdown & Rollback of Rainbow Six Siege
On 27-28 Dec 2025, Ubisoft yanked Rainbow Six Siege offline worldwide and reversed all post-11:00 UTC 27 Dec data after intruders injected billions of premium credits and hijacked moderation tools.
Focusing Facts
- Roughly 2 billion R6 Credits—valued around $13.33 million at Ubisoft’s list price—were dumped into player accounts.
- Servers (and the player-to-player Marketplace) were disconnected for more than 24 hours, from about 09:00 ET 27 Dec until 19:30 ET 28 Dec, while a full rollback was executed.
- Attackers gained ban/unban privileges, posting custom ban-ticker messages and arbitrarily suspending accounts before Ubisoft disabled the feature.
Context
Live-service games have been here before: Sony’s 23-day PlayStation Network outage in April–May 2011 or Blizzard’s 2012 Diablo III Auction House gold-duping scandal similarly exposed the fragility of centralized digital economies. Siege’s breach highlights a structural tension that has grown since the 2010s: publishers monetize games as perpetual services, yet still run them on monolithic back-ends that offer single points of catastrophic failure. In a decade when $60bn+ of virtual goods change hands annually, a 24-hour shutdown and $13 m phantom currency drop may seem minor—but each incident chips away at user trust and invites regulators (and decentralization evangelists) to question publishers’ custodianship of player assets. On a 100-year arc of interactive entertainment, these hacks mark the messy adolescence of digital economies—comparable to early 20th-century bank runs—before stronger technical and legal ‘deposit insurance’ norms inevitably emerge.
Perspectives
Mainstream tech and general news outlets
Mainstream tech and general news outlets — They depict the hack as a massive security failure that flooded players with about $13 million worth of credits, forcing Ubisoft into a global shutdown and painstaking rollback. Headlines stress eye-catching cash equivalents and drama to boost traffic, arguably overstating real-world financial loss because the credits were never liquid and Ubisoft quickly reversed them.
Insider gaming journalists sceptical of the panic
Insider gaming journalists sceptical of the panic — Writers citing internal Ubisoft sources argue the weekend’s breach was "blown way out of proportion," with hackers mainly seeking attention and little lasting harm done. Reliance on unnamed insiders and desire for a contrarian angle may lead them to underplay risks to maintain industry access and differentiate their coverage.
Crypto/Web3-oriented tech media
Crypto/Web3-oriented tech media — They frame the incident as proof that centralised game economies are fragile, noting Ubisoft could roll back credits only because it isn’t built on decentralised tech. Uses the breach as marketing for blockchain solutions, glossing over how irreversible decentralised transactions could worsen similar exploits.