In the early hours of this morning, Day Z servers were at the mercy of a greater threat than the zombie horde. Planes were falling from the sky, players were turned into goats and entire cities were raised with attack helicopters. The resulting mess ended with developer Rocket taking the central server offline while brandishing the banhammer.

I happened to be playing while this was mayhem was taking place. First it was small things with buildings that were previously enterable turned to ruin. Then my survival buddy was turned into a dog. I considered eating him. Then I came across a weapons create with every weapon in the game. Finally, Eleckrozavodsk was leveled with missiles.

If you weren’t playing while all of this was going on, the first mention of the above was from Rocket on the Day Z forum:

“Due to constant and sustained hacking, the central server has been dropped to prevent any further degradation of service to DayZ players, and safeguard any corruption of player data.”

The servers were shortly brought back online, where normality was restored. However there was no such mercy for the culprits:

“We got info from BE that those who have previously been using hacks have received a GLOBAL BAN via BattlEye. Yes, that’s right. You just bricked your copy of ArmA2 in multiplayer.”

Maybe the hackers expected that, but was it really worth the trade off?