Arcades across Japan have spent more than a week with rows of dead screens. Sega Fave, the Sega subsidiary that runs the ALL.Net and Aime arcade networks, shut them down at 3 p.m. on 1 November after a third party gained unauthorized access to some of its servers, and Sega’s own games are still offline.
ALL.Net handles online play, rankings, save data and software updates for a long list of cabinets, and Aime is the card system players tap to load their profile. Sega’s Initial D The Arcade, Maimai and Chunithm depend on them, and so do Bandai Namco titles such as Taiko no Tatsujin and Mario Kart Arcade GP DX. Offline machines that need no network were not touched, and rival arcade operators Taito and Konami run separate networks.
In its notice of 2 November, Sega Fave said the affected servers are internal systems tied to ALL.Net and Aime. It said its first checks found no leak of customer or business partner data, and that payment details, including credit card information, sit apart from those servers and were not affected. The company warned the investigation would take a while, and has not said how the intruder got in.
Bandai Namco’s ALL.Net titles are the first to move. ALL.Net told customers that these games would restart gradually on a trial basis from 8 November, with online play and card use switched on. Sega-made titles remain under maintenance with no restoration date, and a further update is promised for 10 November.
The outage is already costing players events. Organisers of Initial D The Arcade have called off the Double Ace Cup and two regional tournaments, to be rescheduled once service returns, and the Chunithm team is weighing extensions to in-game events and compensation for paying members of its online service.
It is also the second interruption in a few weeks. Kotaku reports that Sega took the same service down for several days at the end of October to deal with a PHP exploit, then reopened it for Japanese users only, which upset the growing number of overseas fans. Sega has not said whether the two incidents are linked.
Players should treat the arcade pages for each title as the place to check status, since Sega has pointed customers to them rather than to one central tracker. There is no word on whether the restriction on overseas access will return when the service does.
