Among Us servers taken offline after DDoS attack

(Image credit: Innersloth)

Players of popular social-deception-in-space game Among Us began having difficulty connecting to its servers on March 24, after which developers Innersloth had to take servers offline to deal with the problem, which is apparently the result of a DDoS attack. Or, as the charmingly informal Among Us Twitter account put it, "we have a sabotage going on lol".

we have a sabotage going on lol🚨 NA and EU servers are getting DDoS'd 🚨service will be offline while the team works on fixing it, but might take a bit, hang tight!!!!! sorry!!!March 25, 2022

Servers in North America and Europe have been taken offline while Innersloth works on fixing the issue. A follow-up tweet explained that "they may come on/off but will update u when we think they're stable, sorry!!!"

This isn't the first time someone has targeted Among Us. Back in 2020, a hack filled its lobbies with bots who repeatedly spammed messages, after which players would be despawned and left in a black room before being disconnected. The messages being spammed tried to convince players to subscribe to the hacker's YouTube channel "or else we will kill your device", after which they signed off with "Trump 2020".

Among Us first released in 2018, but became an unexpected hit in 2020 thanks to a combination of lockdown-induced desperation for something to do with friends online, and going viral on Twitch. Here's the full story on how Among Us became so popular.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.