Apex Legends hacked by annoyed Titanfall player

Appeal to save Titanfall from hacks: hack Apex Legends servers

Unhappy Titanfall player hacks Apex Legends to raise awareness about the poor security state of the Titanfall franchise

On July 4, Respawn – the developer of Apex Legends – started to receive numerous reports which claimed that players are unable to join matches in-game. It was soon confirmed that the game's servers were hacked by an unauthorized party.

According to social media posts (mainly Twitter), players said they were also unable to view the server playlist and instead saw the “SAVETITANFALL.COM, TF1 is being attacked so is Apex” message. Those who were in-game at the time and quit their matches were greeted by a pop-up message which asked users to “Visit and repost savetitanfall.com.”

Titanfall is a previous first-person game series of Respawn Entertainment, the developer of the now multi-billion dollar franchise Apex Legends. Since its release, Titanfall suffered major gameplay disruptions from hacks for years, and many players were unhappy how they were unable to play the game properly.

Now it seems like one of the vigilante hackers responsible for the attack decided to take the matter into their own hands to raise awareness about the unplayable state of Titanfall. Without a doubt, the culprit is unhappy how Respawn is not tackling the hacking issues regarding the Titanfall franchise.

The referenced Discord server and the website unlikely to be related to the hack

It is evidently not known who behind the Apex Legends hack is, although it is likely not to be people behind the savetitanfall.com website – established by TF Remnant Fleet (known as “the biggest original Titanfall 1 community”) and NoSkill Titanfall Modding Discord.

The site was created in order to inform other players about the ongoing attacks against the servers and visibly shows frustration about EA's and Respawn's failure to tackle the constant attacks due to various vulnerabilities within the game. To this day, the game is considered unplayable.^[1]

Since the name of the server and the website was mentioned in the pop-up messages, many assumed that the hacker or hackers are coming from the mentioned community. One of the administrators for TF Remnant Fleet Discord Server, going by the name RedShield, said the following to IGN:^[2]

I would like the Apex Legends' community, on behalf of the TF Remnant Fleet and the Titanfall community, that we stand with you. We are not behind the recent attacks and have no control over them, and that's something that we know the pain of very well. We empathize with you, and hope that things can return to normalcy soon. At the very least, even if Titanfall doesn't get fixed, we hope that Apex Legends can be, as I know that's a game that far more people cherish just as much as we cherish our game.

The admin also said that the attack might have been executed to make the savetitanfall.com website and its creator look bad and create a negative outlook on the Titanfall community. He also mentioned that the hack might have been a product by a genuinely “good-willed” person who wants to raise awareness about the unplayable state of Titanfall.

While the frustration might be understandable, hacking another game and hoping for the developer to fix the it is not going to work. If anything, it spoiled the fun of thousands of players for a while and made the TF Remnant Fleet and savetitanfall.com community look bad.

According to one of the modders, the backlash from the Apex Legends community was immense:^[2]

These people from the Apex community have caused MAJOR damage. Not only to this server, but to people I care about and love. I had to nuke a server because of community updates and controversy starting in my server.

Respawn says no personal user data was exposed during the incident

DDoS attacks, in-game cheating, and similar hacks happen within the gaming world all the time, and all major gaming companies such as Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts,^[3] Ubisoft, and many others are affected. Since the gaming industry continues to thrive for many years now, malicious actors find attacking gaming companies a very lucrative illegal business – we saw a rapid increase of such during 2020 and 2021.^[4] However, this attack is very unorthodox, all things considered.

Respawn Entertainment reacted to the player reports and started an investigation, working on a so-needed fix immediately: it was not initially clear what happened to Apex Legends and what is causing issues. In the meantime, Respawn tweeted that no personal user information, such as account or login data, was affected by the attack.

The company provided hourly updates on Twitter while working on the fix and, on July 5, informed players that all the issues due to the hack were resolved:^[5]

We’ve confirmed that matchmaking has been restored. We’re keeping an eye on things but believe the issue to be resolved.

Thanks for your patience, Legends.