Ubisoft was forced to “intentionally” take Rainbow Six Siege offline during holiday hack

Ubisoft’s tentpole shooter, Rainbow Six Siege, is still struggling after a hacker group forced the publisher to take it offline over the holidays.

Its Service Status page still warns of “unplanned” connectivity, authentication, in-game store, and matchmaking issues days after the team notified players of an “incident” on December 27.

After hackers reportedly banned and unbanned thousands of accounts, reinstalled the ban feed, and gave two billion credits and renown to each player, as well as all available premium skins, the development team “intentionally shut down” the game and its online store while it investigated.

Promising no players would be penalized for spending any of the erroneously allocated funds, the team rolled back all transactions that occurred during the hack and initiated a “soft” invite-only re-launch on December 29.

After “closely monitoring” the game after bringing it back online, Ubisoft thanked players for their patience as it “investigate[d] the cause of these known issues and ensure the whole community can get back to playing Siege.”

At the time of writing, there has been no further public information about the third-party hack, but Ubisoft did confirm that an official R6 ShieldGuard ban wave “did occur but is not related to this incident.”