Ubisoft's DRM Servers Go Down

I’ve never played this game, but in the last week or so, my attempts to play multiplayer games with my kids (Uru and Dungeons and Dragons Online) have been thwarted by the fact that my modem blips out for a few minutes every couple hours, which freezes up games that exchange information over the internet. 

Rather than risk losing all his progress in the middle of a quest, my son has occasionally opted to play a one-player game while his sister and I, sitting in the same room, continue to wrestle with the multi-player game.  But I see that Ubisoft requires an internet connection for its recent single-player games, not because the internet adds anything to the gameplay, but simply as a digital rights managemen (DRM) procedure.

Hackers broke the latest copy-protection scheme within 24 hours, and shortly after that, the servers went down, so that (at least until the servers come back up) only the people who own cracked copies of the game can play it.

Do you think some hackers maybe “helped” the DRM servers to crash, just a little bit, in order to generate news stories like this? The story arc perfectly fits the anti-DRM warnings.

Ubisoft’s DRM servers were overloaded over the weekend, rendering the recently released PC version of Assassin’s Creed II unplayable for many legitamate owners of the game.

In an attempt to combat piracy, Ubisoft announced an extreme method of DRM whereby games required a constant internet connection.

Assassin’s Creed II, released last week, was the one of the first games
to support the policy, and its first weekend has been plagued by server
issues with posters on the official forums

“Due to exceptional demand, we are currently experiencing difficulties with the Online Service Platform,” said an official response on the forums,
“This does not affect customers who are currently playing, but
customers attempting to start a game may experience difficulty in
accessing our servers. We are currently working to resolve this issue
and apologize for any inconvenience.”–IGN

telling of connection outages.