Embark Studios has confirmed "extensive, coordinated" DDoS attacks against Arc Raiders and The Finals. Here’s what that actually means for matchmaking, stability, and your loot this week, plus what you can realistically do as a player.
If you’ve tried to boot up Arc Raiders or The Finals this week and hit a wall of errors, rubber‑banding, or endless loading screens, you’re not alone. Embark Studios has confirmed that both games are currently being hit by what it calls “extensive, coordinated” DDoS attacks that are still ongoing at the time of writing.
This is a quick, practical breakdown of what’s happening, how it affects your matches and loot, what Embark is actually saying, and what you should do if you’re playing or thinking about jumping in this week.
What a DDoS attack means in Arc Raiders and The Finals
In simple player terms, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is when a huge amount of fake traffic is blasted at a game’s servers so that legitimate players struggle to get a response. The servers are still there, but they are so busy dealing with junk connections that they cannot properly serve normal matchmaking and in‑game actions.
For Arc Raiders and The Finals, that translates into very specific symptoms:
Players may log in successfully, then immediately feel like the game is “falling apart” the moment they try to join a lobby, extract, or fight. Position updates, damage registration, and inventory changes all rely on quick, constant communication with Embark’s servers, so when that communication chokes, everything from movement to looting starts to break down.
Crucially, this situation is about server availability and stability, not some kind of client‑side hack. You are not being individually targeted when you queue; you are caught in the crossfire of overloaded infrastructure.
What players are actually seeing right now
Across official Discords, Steam discussions, Reddit, and social channels, reports line up with what Embark has acknowledged in its own statements:
Arc Raiders players are getting heavy rubber‑banding and delayed inputs, then watching their Raider snap back to old positions or freeze completely. Others load into a match, see almost no enemies or players moving, then get kicked to menus with generic error codes.
A huge point of frustration is that some extraction runs appear to complete on the player’s screen but never finish correctly on the server. That is where the fear of “lost loot” comes from: the run looks done, the loot is in your pack, but the last few seconds of data never cleanly reach Embark’s backend, so the rewards do not stick to your account.
On The Finals side, the symptoms are a little more straightforward but just as annoying. Players report being stuck in matchmaking for several minutes before timing out, loading into matches that never fully start, or watching teammates teleport and objectives desync as the server struggles to keep up. Even when a match does play out, spikes of lag are common.
In both games, some players are seeing:
Login taking far longer than normal or failing on the first few attempts.
Matchmaking queues that end in error screens instead of matches.
Matches that suddenly freeze, drop everyone, or refuse to end properly.
So if your experience looks like that, it is very likely part of the same DDoS fallout, not your PC, console, or home connection.
What Embark has officially said
Embark has not tried to hide what is going on. Across its official Arc Raiders and The Finals Discords and social updates, the studio has confirmed that both titles are under:
“Extensive, coordinated DDoS attacks.”
The key phrases in its messaging are that the attacks are ongoing and that Embark is working hard to mitigate them. The studio has repeatedly framed this as an infrastructure‑level issue that is affecting both games at the same time, not a bug that is specific to a certain patch or platform.
One important detail for Arc Raiders players is timing. The attacks ramped up just as the Headwinds update rolled out, a major patch that introduced solo vs squads matchmaking, the Bird City map condition, and other tweaks. That combination of new code and external pressure made it hard at first for players to tell whether issues were “just a bad patch” or something more targeted. Embark’s later confirmations on Discord and in public statements made it clear that the DDoS traffic is a primary factor behind the most severe instability.
Embark has also noted that it is deploying hotfixes alongside its mitigation work. For Arc Raiders specifically, a hotfix on the same day as some of the worst outages was aimed at fixing unintended changes and bugs from Headwinds, but it is being tested and rolled out in the shadow of the DDoS problem. The net result is that even bug‑fix patches might not immediately feel as stable as you would expect under normal conditions.
In short: Embark has acknowledged the attacks, is not pretending this is just routine maintenance, and is actively adjusting both server‑side protections and game code while the situation continues.
How this affects you right now in Arc Raiders
If you play Arc Raiders this week, you should go in expecting uneven results from one session to the next.
Peak playtimes, especially in European and North American evenings, seem to be the roughest. Matchmaking may be completely stuck for a while, then suddenly let you in, then drop you before extraction. You may also find that certain regions have more issues than others depending on which data centers are getting hammered the hardest at any given moment.
The big concern for most Raiders is progress. When the server is under heavy load, anything that requires a clean, final confirmation from Embark’s backend is at risk of failing silently. That includes the moment an extraction completes, rewards are counted, and new gear or currency is attached to your account. If that handshake does not go through, your run might not exist as far as the game’s persistent data is concerned.
That does not mean every run during this period will be lost, but it does mean the risk is higher than usual. If you are thinking of pushing your best kit into a high‑risk run or chasing long‑shot objectives right now, it is worth pausing and asking whether you would be okay walking away empty‑handed if the server chokes at the wrong second.
How this affects you right now in The Finals
The Finals is suffering from a slightly different flavor of pain. Since its core loop is centered around fast, movement‑heavy arena matches, any network instability is instantly visible.
Expect queues that intermittently fail, matches that start with teams down one or two players because of connection drops, and sudden lag spikes when the server load surges. In some cases, mid‑match crashes or disconnects will throw you back to the menus with only partial or no progress recorded toward contracts, XP, or battle pass tiers.
If you are pushing ranked or trying to grind specific progression goals this week, it might feel like two steps forward and one step back. Some games will be perfectly fine, others will fall apart for reasons that clearly have nothing to do with your ping or hardware.
What Embark is doing behind the scenes
Embark has not gone deep into technical detail, but its public messaging and behavior point to a few active fronts of work.
First, it is tuning server‑side protections and traffic filtering in an attempt to separate real player requests from junk traffic without accidentally locking out actual users. That kind of tuning often happens iteratively, which is why you may see windows of relative stability followed by fresh waves of trouble as attackers adjust.
Second, Embark is using hotfixes and configuration changes to shore up how the games handle failure. Even if a server is stressed, the goal is to reduce the scenarios where players become stuck in endless loading screens or partially completed matches that they cannot leave.
Third, communication itself is part of the response. Embark has been using Discord and social channels to confirm the DDoS problem, set expectations, and warn players during the worst windows. If you only see the in‑game error messages, it can look random and confusing; following the official channels makes the pattern easier to understand.
The important point is that from the outside, you cannot “see” most of this work directly, but you feel it in whether your next queue pops smoothly or disintegrates.
Should you play Arc Raiders or The Finals this week?
If you are already deep into Arc Raiders, the safest approach right now is to treat this as a high‑variance period.
If you are just hopping on for a casual run, willing to lose a bit of progress and time if the servers wobble, there is still fun to be had. Plenty of players are getting full matches and successful extractions between the worst spikes. Just do not count on every session finishing cleanly.
If you are chasing high‑value loot or running your absolute best loadouts, it may be worth waiting until Embark gives a clear signal that stability has improved. Losing a throwaway run to a server crash is annoying. Losing a carefully planned raid that goes perfectly until the final seconds is the kind of frustration that makes people uninstall.
For The Finals, the calculus is mostly about your tolerance for inconsistent queues and occasional laggy matches. If you are playing casually with friends, you can probably shrug off the odd busted game. If you are trying to climb hard in ranked or finish time‑limited contracts, you might prefer to hold fire until Embark confirms that the worst of the DDoS activity has been contained.
If you are entirely new and thinking about installing either game this week, it is still worth doing so, but go in with the expectation that your first impressions may be skewed by circumstances that have nothing to do with the core game design.
Practical tips for playing during the attacks
There is no client‑side magic switch that lets you “solve” a DDoS attack, but you can play in ways that respect the current instability.
Check official channels before long sessions. The Arc Raiders and The Finals Discords, as well as their social accounts, are where Embark is flagging ongoing issues and hotfix rollouts. If the team is actively warning players about turbulence, take that seriously.
Avoid high stakes runs when stability feels poor. If you notice that matchmaking is flaky or your first match of the night is full of stutters and rollbacks, switch to safer activities or take a break rather than pushing into the riskiest possible content.
Be patient with reconnects and queues. Rapidly canceling and re‑queuing the moment something seems wrong will not help and can sometimes make it harder for the servers to stabilize your session. Give the game a little longer than usual to sort itself out before you assume it is frozen.
Consider playing at off‑peak hours. While not guaranteed, some players are reporting smoother sessions outside of prime evening windows. If your schedule is flexible, this can be a simple way to dodge the worst spikes.
Treat error messages as expected noise for now. You may see a higher variety of generic errors than usual. As long as you can get back to menus and relaunch the game, they are not a sign that your account is in trouble; they are the servers timing out under stress.
What this does not mean for your account
A common worry whenever server issues make headlines is whether accounts or personal data are at risk. The behavior Embark is describing and that players are seeing is classic availability trouble: timeouts, failed match starts, dropped sessions, and lost progress from runs that do not finish cleanly.
From a player‑facing standpoint, the main risk right now is wasted time and possibly losing rewards from unstable matches, not losing control of your account. Standard good habits still apply, such as keeping your platform account secure and not sharing login details, but those are general online gaming rules rather than something specific to this DDoS situation.
The bottom line for Arc Raiders and The Finals players
Both Arc Raiders and The Finals are in a rough patch this week because of “extensive, coordinated” DDoS attacks that Embark has publicly confirmed. The result is a tug of war between attackers hammering the servers and Embark trying to filter that traffic while keeping real players online.
If you jump in today, expect unstable matchmaking, lag spikes, and the possibility of progress not always saving correctly, especially during peak hours. Embark is deploying hotfixes, tuning protections, and communicating through Discord and social channels, but there is no instant flip that can return everything to normal.
If you are happy to roll with some chaos, you can still get good sessions in both games, but if you care deeply about every run and every ranked match, it may be smarter to treat this as a watch‑and‑wait moment until the studio signals a clearer return to stable service.