Why are Apex Legends servers being hacked to ‘Save Titanfall’?

An attack on Apex Legends is keeping players from matchmaking in the game, and its perpetrators seem to have one main goal in mind: drawing attention to the rampant issues in Titanfall by taking down the Apex servers.

The hack comes as an extreme plea for Respawn to take action against hackers and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the first Titanfall. The attackers likely aimed to expose vulnerabilities that lead to the intractable state of the game, given that the studio operates both franchises.

Hackers tampered with playlist data in Apex to prevent players from entering matches. Instead of the usual game mode names, the in-game tooltips directed users to a website called savetitanfall.com, a page created by fans to be a “central hub” of information about the long-standing issues in the title. The site has no affiliation with the attack, however, as evidenced by both the admins and the hackers themselves.

The attack is a drastic effort to draw attention to the state of Titanfall, which some fans describe as “unplayable.” The community’s perception seems to be one of helplessness—in spite of Respawn’s promise that “help is coming ASAP” last April.

Respawn “is still working on a fix and testing solutions” to restore service in Apex. The studio showed intent to address the situation inTitanfall before the attack on July 4, but it will likely take some time to develop concrete solutions—and it will likely only be after restoring service to Apex.

How bad is the situation in Titanfall?

Titanfall fans have complained about the issues for a long time. The savetitanfall.com page says that the community “has been begging Respawn to fix this issue for over three years, but to no avail.” A Reddit post from February 2019 points out the existence of an exploit that lets players “easily crash game servers.” The glitch “has been known for quite some time,” according to the post.

Titanfall’s Steam debut in November 2020 did little to change the situation. Its reviews on the platform are classed as “mostly negative,” with only 36 percent of comments categorized as positive. That number drops to 13 percent in the last month. They all have one thing in common: no one can access the game.

Respawn addressed the protracted issues recently. The official account acknowledged “ongoing attacks” in April and a “new wave” of them in May. In addition, the studio said it was running “parallel efforts” to address attacks on both Titanfall and Apex. Despite its attempts, however, the issues with Titanfall still persist.