In a recent message posted to Medium, VRChat has revealed that it has been the target of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks by hackers.
Actually, VRChat and other social VR platforms have always been the targets of hacker attacks. But the last two weeks have been exceptional:
For approximately 2 weeks, VRChat’s real-time networking partner has been experiencing intermittent DDoS attacks. These attacks seem to have been specifically targeted against VRChat, and have been timed to coincide with our historical daily and weekly concurrent user peaks. If you were visiting VRChat this weekend, you may have experienced a room “lagging” to the point where all other users in the room froze, followed by disconnection and reloading to Home. That behavior indicates an attack.
This is another example of the growing pains VRChat has experienced since its livestream-fueled surge in concurrent users early last year. With increased popularity come the attendant risk from hackers who will try to bring the service down, just for fun. It’s unfortunate, but it’s a fact of life for any online service.