GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 online services suffer outages in apparent DDoS attack over GTA Online's new anti-cheat tech

GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2's online services have recently suffered outages due to DDoS attacks in apparent retaliation to Rockstar's new anti-cheat efforts.

Last week, Rockstar introduced Battle-Eye anti-cheat to GTA Online to bolster its own fair-play tools. While many might have thought the prevalence of cheating within GTA Online meant that introduction was well overdue, the extra restrictions spelled bad news for modders and those on older or more limited hardware. And it seems that someone decided to bite back.

As noted by CyberInsider, the attacks began over the weekend, leading to connection issues across GTA Online and Red Dead Online on all platforms. Cyber Insider reports that the group behind the attacks was protesting the introduction of BattlEye, citing a Twitter user who suggested that players could potentially "expect more DDoS attacks in the following days." However, it looks as though those attacks haven't materialized just yet.

Unfortunately, Rockstar is no stranger to online threats like these. It's faced issues in GTA Online before, of course, but it's also had to deal with attacks dedicated to GTA 6. After the enormous September 2022 GTA 6 leak, Rockstar had to deal with the dissemination of a huge amount of information from the earlier days of the game's development. That's seemingly been rectified by the presence of actual GTA 6 trailer footage, but it's still likely to leave the company extremely wary of any follow-ups.

GTA 6 will sell "for 10+ years," and because "there is no competition" Rockstar is "not going to release the game until they're 100% happy with it," reckons former GTA dev.