GT Sport Had So Many Players On Christmas Weekend, PSN Thought It Was a DDoS Attack

GT Sport has recently had issues connecting to servers, nearly making playing impossible for the last couple of days. This makes it hard to play, considering the game is online only, a fact that was criticised by a fellow PlayStation developer. However, the difficulty connecting has since been fixed, and the cause of the issue is actually quite funny.

PlayStation Network mistook the game’s issues as a denial of service (DDoS) attack, but it turns out the game was simply very popular over the weekend. Starting on December 23, users would run into “NE-21104400” errors and the inability to connect to the game.

The nature of the issue was initially unclear. Yamauchi tweeted that GT Sport’s servers were working as they should be, then later stated that he believed it to be Sony’s PSN servers at fault.

More than 24 hours later, the team resolved the issue, finding that it wasn’t a DDoS attack at all, but legitimate connections from an unexpected amount of users.

“The startup log in problem that had been inconveniencing our users has just been resolved with the support of the PlayStation™Network Team.

“The cause of the issue was that the unexpectedly large numbers of user network traffic had been mistakenly identified as an attack on the PlayStation™Network, and the login attempts were blocked by the system.

“Hereon, we will work with the PlayStation Network so that something like this never recurs.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.”

False flagging GT Sports as a DDoS attack accidentally because of too many users can be considered a good thing despite the disruption in service, though it calls more attention to the seemingly overreaching online-only gameplay even for saving progress in single player.