Rainbow Six Siege is still struggling today after hackers gave out “billions” in in-game currency, forcing Ubisoft to briefly “intentionally” shut down the game.
While Ubisoft has not shared much of the details, players reported that the hackers banned – and unbanned – thousands of players, took control of the ban feed, gave all players 2 billion credits and renown each, and unlocked every premium skin for all players without charge.
Hackers then banned dozens of fake accounts “so that the usernames displayed the lyrics of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean” on-screen, as seen below.
While Ubisoft says the issue is now resolved, the game’s service page suggests issues persist right across the board.
After notifying players of an “incident” on 27th December, the publisher “intentionally shut down” both Siege and its Marketplace “while the team focuses on resolving the issue”.
It also confirmed that while it had rolled back erroneous transactions, “nobody will be banned for spending credits received” and reminded players that the ban ticker had been turned off in a prior update.
“An official R6 ShieldGuard ban wave did occur, but is not related to this incident,” Ubisoft added. “We are working very hard to make sure this is resolved and players can play again.
“A rollback is currently ongoing and afterwards, extensive quality control tests will be executed to ensure the integrity of accounts and effectiveness of changes,” the team added in a subsequent update on X/Twitter. “The team is focused on getting players back into the game as quickly as possible.
“Please know that this matter is being handled with extreme care and therefore, timing cannot be guaranteed. We will provide another update as soon as we know more. Thank you all for your patience and understanding as we continue to tackle this.”
Then, on 28th December, Ubisoft launched a “soft launch”, which only opened the game to a “small number of players only” while it completed live tests. Yesterday, 29th December, tests concluded and the game opened up to all again.
As a consequence, however, players experienced queues whilst connecting, and while players who didn’t log in during the affected period should see no changes, those who did “may temporarily lose access to some owned items. Investigations and corrections will continue over the next two weeks”.
The Marketplace remains closed “until further notice”.
“We appreciate your patience as we work hard to investigate the cause of these known issues and ensure the whole community can get back to playing Siege,” Ubisoft said in its latest official communication.
At the time of writing, however, the game’s service status page suggests “unplanned” outages persist, with connectivity, authentication, in-game store, and matchmaking all listed as “degraded” or showing a complete “outage” across every single platform (PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and last-gen systems). It’s unclear why at this time.
