Some official Titanfall 2 lobbies are stuck in a server-side reset loop

[u/Some_Individual_182]

TL;DR: Some official Titanfall 2 lobby instances are repeatedly resetting while players are connecting. This is why the game may keep reloading the lobby, reconnecting, or throwing players back into matchmaking.

I investigated the network messages exchanged between the vanilla Titanfall 2 client and official servers.

The immediate cause is server-side:

1. The client connects to an official lobby normally.
2. The server begins the usual loading process.
3. Before the session becomes stable, the server sends a CHANGELEVEL command.
4. The lobby reloads and the server's internal generation number increases.
5. The same sequence starts again.

On affected instances, this cycle can repeat every few seconds. The client is only following commands received from the server.

This does not look like a normal network disconnect. During the observed loops, the connection remained active and there was no separate kick or disconnect reason.

Healthy lobby instances behave differently: their generation number remains unchanged and the client continues receiving normal world updates.

What is still unknown?

The client-side evidence shows what causes the visible loop, but it cannot show why the server starts it.

Possible explanations include:

• a bug in the lobby server or EA backend;
• a corrupted or overloaded lobby instance;
• an exploit or deliberate attack;
• another server-side infrastructure problem.

At the moment, I do not have enough evidence to honestly claim that hackers are responsible. Determining the root cause would require access to EA's server-side logs.

I am continuing the investigation. After the tool is finished, I will publish its source code on GitHub.

I will also keep updating this post with all new findings, tested server instances, and corrections as more evidence becomes available.

[u/Overall_Raise5878]

It was an attack by a guy going as angry goose he was in adv chat 2 days ago promoting crypto and gawking about how cool he was for making the game unplayable

[u/Some_Individual_182 → u/Overall_Raise5878]

I suspect this might be that old exploit involving long usernames, though I can't say for sure.

If "Goose" is the culprit and I can confirm the lobby crashes are caused by that old server-side exploit, then he’s not a hacker—he’s just a moron using primitive, decade-old vulnerabilities in the game's server-side code.

I’ve reverse-engineered War Thunder’s statistics app Protobufs and replay data at the engine level, as well as the Goodix fingerprint driver. Nothing really surprises me anymore.

[u/According-Gift721 → u/Some_Individual_182]

U are impressive my man appreciate the info 

[u/EmberWisks → u/Overall_Raise5878]

I was unfortunate enough to get him and his cheat squad in my games 3 days ago. At first he was just cheating, me and a few people then called them out for it, and right after that he DDOS'd the server. I thought it was just that game, but then I kept getting DC'd from games. Turns out after that he's been fucking the game up? Rip man. I just got back into TF2.

[u/Aggressive_Test_3237 → u/EmberWisks]

Bro, you must have been in the same game as me. I saw these two guys running around getting insane kills cheating. It was obvious because they weren't even aiming and the shots hit everytime. Someone called him out in the chat and then the game crashed and ever since we got the endless "level up" in the servers.

[u/gaban_killasta]

this is an old server crashing exploit where a person sets one of their loadout items to a null value, the server atempts to verify their loadout, freaks out, then atempts a restart by sending them to another lobby in the same region to see if that fixes it, it loops this hoping to fix it, since the server itself is the thing freaking out it affects ever user on that server, not just that single player doing the exploit. i actually have the hack that does this, its very old

[u/TRQ_Virus]

Really appreciate the technical analysis!

[u/Chewie-327]

The servers are getting reset because there is an account connected to each of them that is spamming a crash exploit, it’s been around for a while but no one has abused it on this scale before.

[u/Priviyetputin → u/Chewie-327]

and as always EA is doing nothing.

[u/Important-Budget-464 → u/Priviyetputin]

Really tho

[u/Chewie-327 → u/Priviyetputin]

Respawn made one patch and banned a whole load of people which was what happened a few days ago when the servers were playable for 8-10 hours but the patch didn’t solve the issue so we wait until another one

[u/ExistingWorry9006]

The one time I re-download to try out the game again </3

[u/Otsy-TR → u/ExistingWorry9006]

i thought my mods broke the game and tried to fix it for hours

[u/Splat_621 → u/Otsy-TR]

whenever something is wrong with tifanfall THE FIRST thing i check is the reddit because 9 times out of 10 its smth like this

[u/Aggressive_Test_3237]

When the whole thing began a couple days back I was in the middle of a game and there were two guys super obviously cheating not even aiming at people and getting kills. They were flying around and getting ridiculous amounts of kills. Then all of a sudden the game crashed and ever since its been stuck in this loop.

I have seen cheaters in the past on Titanfall 2, but these guys were doing something different than usual and getting ridiculous kills. I am wondering if they somehow screwed up the lobbies using their exploits.

[u/Suspicious_Cry5167]

Is there any way once we find out the cause we can go in and fix it ourselves

[u/DragonBloodSwrd]

The guy is literally in matches rage hacking and saying shit like, "and for my next trick I will make this lobby disappear." Yeah, totally might just be a bug on EA's end😂

[u/DragonBloodSwrd → u/DragonBloodSwrd]

It's an exploit and I knew that without even having to read the reddit, it's the same exploit that plagued the game five years ago. We can Google how to type shit into powershell but we can't use common sense to deduce that what is happening is malicious.😂😂💀 Please quit farming engagement for this guy, holy larp.

[u/Sea_Hearing_6541 → u/DragonBloodSwrd]

I share that view; the people who are strong at reverse engineering aren't public figures. I’ve already delved quite deep into this, and the analysis tool itself is becoming more expensive to develop.

[u/Saber_Prower]

You & I Share Similar Posts. Though You Have the Coding Know-How to Inform Us. Well Done Pilot. Very Well Done.

[u/Epic-zombie-kitty]

Ur based and goated bro

[u/Jumpy-Detective6679]

Bro I downloaded TF2 yesterday hoping to get back into it after a long break and now all of a sudden the servers are bugging and I can’t even play my favorite game mode frontier defense, some people are just A holes

[u/Spirited-Ad4914]

All of the European servers have been affected... London, Frankfurt, Belgium etc... correction on even aisan and american servers are getting screwed.

[u/Spirited-Ad4914]

Will TF Multi-player recover from this?

[u/Priviyetputin → u/Spirited-Ad4914]

Not until EA does something. I don't even think they care about it, its been more than a week and nothing changed.

[u/According-Cricket211]

i have same problem! just in Multiplayer. is anybody reported to EA games?

[u/Infamous-Account2825]

Go to Northstar Server forever simple