Apex Legends anti-cheat accidentally drops ban hammer on innocent players

On January 13, Apex Legends’ anti-cheat accidentally sent out a ban wave suspending the accounts of multiple innocent players.

As with most multiplayer FPSs, Apex Legends makes use of an anti-cheat to prevent players from using third-party software to gain an unfair advantage.

While this feature is necessary and detects the majority of hackers, it does sometimes ban innocent players from time to time, and these are usually accessed by Respawn individually.

However, it’s not very often that the anti-cheat bans a huge group of players for seemingly no reason at all, and that’s exactly what happened on January 13.

Respawn Entertainment

Apex Legends uses the Easy Anti-Cheat.

Apex Legends players permanently banned for no reason

Taking to Twitter on January 13, Apex Legends streamer and ALGS player Nez posted a picture of their account ban. With a caption of just question marks, it was obvious they had no idea why they had received the punishment.

Luckily, a short while afterward, Security Analyst at Respawn Conor ‘Hideouts’ Ford responded to the tweet and revealed there had been a major mistake on the side of Easy Anti-cheat.

According to him, the program had accidentally sent out a mass ban that had suspended the accounts of multiple innocent players.

Hideouts quickly confirmed that all accounts that had been suspended by mistake have now been re-activated. However, it’s likely the ban message gave quite a few Apex players a scare.

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While this will have certainly frustrated those who have been affected, all anti-cheat programs occasionally make mistakes.

Despite this, with so many complaints about DDoSers and hackers at the high ranks of play, Respawn does need to consider improving its detection system in the near future.