iRacing suffers multiple DDoS attacks, now back online

The iRacing driving simulation service went offline temporarily yesterday, 7th July, following a distributed denial of service.

According to the subscription-based racing service, it has been the target of DDoS cyber attacks – a process that intends to make a resource unavailable or disrupted but is not seeking personal data – intermittently for just over a week.

Consequently, the sim racing platform was down for roughly eight hours, before coming back online sometime after 4 am BST (12th) / 11 pm EDT (11th).

“We have been experiencing intermittent DDoS attacks for the past eight days,” said iRacing’s Senior VP and Executive Producer Greg Hill in a forum post.

“This has culminated with sustained attacks this afternoon and evening. Our operations team has been continuously engaged in attempting to mitigate these attacks from a bad actor(s).

“We apologize for the disruption to the service that you are paying for. We strive to provide the best and most reliable racing service and know we are not reaching that goal.

“We will continue our efforts to resolve the issue – it is a serious federal crime with serious penalties to use such methods to attack an individual or company. We are working with the proper authorities regarding this bad actor(s).”

This follows similar DDoS attacks on the title earlier this month. iRacing team members posted via the platform’s forum a week ago about numerous attacks between 3rd-5th July.

The recent interruption affects the INDYCAR Pro Series qualifier and eNASCAR RTP Series events.

“We will evaluate the best way to handle the missed races once we get the servers back under control,” said Hill.

“Nothing will be decided tonight and we will not be rescheduling races this evening.

Testing iRacing moments before publishing this article, racing seems to be back to regular operation.