The single-sharded universe of EVE Online and DUST 514 has been offlined as the result of a sustained Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, in which unknown parties bombard a target address with a high volume of data in order to cripple normal service.

In the early hours of Sunday morning in Europe, CCP Games personnel became aware of the attack against the London-based Tranquility server cluster and associated web servers. The server was subsequently taken offline by CCP in order to evaluate the situation and, despite a brief return to service, has remained offline since 1450 (over 5 hours at time of writing).

A Facebook statement issued by a CCP Games spokesman offered this explanation:

At 02:05 GMT June 2nd, CCP became aware of a significant and sustained distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) against the Tranquility cluster (which houses EVE Online and DUST 514) and web servers. Our policy in such cases is to mobilize a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation. At 03:07 GMT, that group concluded that our best course of action was to go completely offline while we put in place mitigation plans. While we initially reopened EVE Online and DUST 514, we have since re-evaluated. With the highest sense of precaution we have taken Tranquility and associated websites back down for further investigation and an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure. We will update you more frequently via our Twitter feed (www.twitter.com/eveonline), however, an extended service interruption of several hours is expected as this process should not be rushed.as this process should not be rushed.

This is not the first time in EVE's history that the Tranquility server has been subject to a DDoS attack. Two years ago an organisation known as Lulzsec performed a DDoS attack which led to the precautionary shutdown of the EVE Online gameworld.

Thus far, no one has claimed responsiblty for the attack.

More information will be supplied as it is known.

Update #1:

We are still hard at work. Thanks your your patience. No ETA quite yet. #eveonline #tweetfleet — EVE Online (@EveOnline) June 2, 2013

Update #2:

We continue to make progress in getting Tranquility and web services back up and running. (Tweet 1 of 3)#eveonline #tweetfleet — EVE Online (@EveOnline) June 3, 2013

This is a very time intensive process and we estimate several more hours of work. (Tweet 2 of 3) #eveonline #tweetfleet — EVE Online (@EveOnline) June 3, 2013

Your patience has been legendary and appreciated. (Tweet 3 of 3) #eveonline #tweetfleet — EVE Online (@EveOnline) June 3, 2013

Update #3:

Our engineers are close to resolving the issues on Tranquility. We aim to have have our servers live as soon as we possibly can. #tweetfleet — EVE Online (@EveOnline) June 3, 2013

Update #4 (evidence of a recovery):

However, the cluster is not yet accepting connections:

And finally, Update #5:

EVE is back online. Please refer to this news item for more information about what happened #tweetfleet community.eveonline.com/news/news-chan… — EVE Online (@EveOnline) June 3, 2013

For further information, the aftermath is covered in CCP after EVE/DUST DDoS Attack: 'at no time was customer data compromised'.

[Statistical images courtesy of EVE Offline.]