Gears of War: E-Day hit by DDoS attacks that knocked some players offline

What The Coalition has confirmed

Gears of War: E-Day has ended its first full weekend with connection problems. Between Sunday, October 11 and the early hours of Monday, October 12 (CEST), some players suffered intermittent disconnects, failed logins and other service disruptions.

The Coalition, the Xbox studio behind the series, explained the cause through its Gears Community account on X: the issues were due to "distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting our online services". The studio says its teams are continuing to monitor and mitigate this activity. A DDoS attack floods servers with malicious traffic until they can no longer respond. The studio has not said who is behind the attacks or exactly how long the outages lasted.

Xbox says the issue is resolved

The Xbox Support account also acknowledged problems with the game's servers, without mentioning the attacks, and at 7:40 a.m. CEST on Monday said service was back to normal. During the incident, the Xbox status page listed both Xbox sign-in and Gears of War: E-Day itself as a major outage, grouped under a single incident, as reported by Twisted Voxel.

On social media, some users claimed the attack hit the whole Xbox network because they could not use anything that required a connection. There is no official confirmation that the attacks affected the whole network: although the Xbox status page grouped Xbox sign-in and E-Day under a single incident, neither Xbox nor The Coalition has linked the attacks to other services.

The trouble started earlier

This was not the weekend's first stumble. On Sunday afternoon, the Gears Community account warned that logins were taking longer than usual and, shortly after midnight CEST, declared the issue resolved and promised to keep a close eye on its services. Soon after, MP1st reported fresh problems: very slow logins and errors syncing save data, to the point that the outlet could not load its campaign in online mode.

What players can do

If the game fails again, it helps to know the problem lies with the servers rather than with each player's console or PC. MP1st managed to continue its campaign save on PC by launching the game in offline mode, although other users still had trouble loading theirs. That workaround does not help with online modes: online campaign co-op, Horde Siege and Versus depend on the servers and, according to Xbox, require a Game Pass subscription that includes online multiplayer.

To check whether there is an active incident, the most reliable places are the Xbox status page and the Gears Community account on X, which The Coalition used to report the attacks.

A blow in launch week

The attacks came less than a week after the worldwide launch on October 6 on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC and Steam, with the game available from day one on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass; Premium Edition owners had been able to play since October 1. E-Day is a prequel set fourteen years before the original Gears of War, following Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago as the Locust Horde first emerges. For now, The Coalition has not announced any compensation or changes to its services.