TL;DR: Titanfall 1 (PC) and Titanfall 2 (all platforms) multiplayer are generally not playable. Respawn not acknowledging the issue at all. On PC community-created solutions such as Northstar seem to be the way forward.
Previous sticky on this topic can be found here: https://redd.it/ppzqn1
(D)DoS attacks on Titanfall 2 servers
History:
Attacks on Titanfall 2 roughly started in the spring of 2021 with the infamous blacklist lasting a few months. Then during summer, there were two larger attacks that left the game unplayable twice for longer periods (first one around a week, second 2-3 weeks).
Current
At the start of December 2021 shortly after Titanfall 1 was taken from the sale, attacks on both Titanfall 1 and Titanfall 2 resurfaced. For Titanfall 2 attack patterns seem to vary but the most common one is where you can join MP games and play around but every 10-30 seconds there’s a huge ping spike with a high chance to disconnect your client from the server, putting you back to the main menu with some error message.
While there have occasionally been short periods in which the game was playable these are rare and likely simply caused by the attackers ceasing fire to work on their infrastructure.
Since 2022-01-03 the game now displays error code 429/0xffffffff when trying to launch multiplayer. It’s not clear whether this is yet another attack or Respawns performing maintenance on the servers.
Regardless of its current state, Titanfall 2 multiplayer on official servers should be considered unplayable for all platforms.
Sidenote: Known issues outside of (D)DoS attacks:
Outside of those attacks since the last wave after the end of summer 2021, Titanfall 2 was also plagued by some other issues likely connected to what every Respawn tried to do to stop attacks from happening. This include:
Frequent random disconnects in MP waiting lobby -> just reconnect
PvP unplayable disconnects once 12+ players in a lobby
Northstar
As most of you might be aware, the 24th of December marked the public release of Northstar, a PC-only modding framework that allows players to join and host custom servers.
Due to its only very recent release we will refrain from officially endorsing it, however with its big popularity we cannot leave it unacknowledged either, especially as it might be the only way to enjoy TF|2 multiplayer in the future.
Pilots interested in finding out more about Northstar can check out the release repo and wiki.
We do want to point out however that the source code surrounding Northstar is public and can be found organized in multiple repositories here: https://github.com/R2Northstar/
Pilots with experience in software development are especially encouraged to check it out and build it from the source.
Finally we want to point out that while Northstar is a welcome addition to the Titanfall community, it does not lift Respawn from their obligation of fixing Titanfall 2 multiplayer.
Especially as our fellow pilots on consoles which make up 2/3 of the playerbase currently have no way to properly enjoy Titanfall 2 multiplayer at all!
Single player:
Single player is not dependent on multiplayer servers at all and as such has always been and will always continue to be playable.
PC
History:
Titanfall 1 has had a troubled past ever since the release of Titanfall 2. Starting with people crashing servers on purpose. Over the years this has manifested itself into automated attacks keeping anyone from playing.
There were short periods in which the game was fully playable, like during the game’s release on Steam in 2020.
2021 saw a big turning point for the game when Respawn added a server side patch during the summer that restored the game to its former playable state.
It therefore came as a surprise when in December 2021 they announced the end of sale.
Current:
With the announced end of sale of Titanfall 1, attacks on PC also resurfaced making the game nearly completely unplayable. Select regions seem to be available from time to time. Most commonly South US Central and SEA.
In their end-of-sale post on Twitter Respawn did mention that they are planning to keep servers alive.
So it remains to be seen whether they will restore servers once more.
As a side note: keep in mind that should you plan to buy a Titanfall 1 CD key from a third party for some reason with the intention of playing it in the future should attacks ever cease, make sure to get the deluxe edition. The game requires free DLCs to join all multiplayer modes except campaign, which while free have to be added to your library. As the DLCs have been taken from the store together with the game the only way to acquire them is through the deluxe edition or through a season pass key if you own the base game without DLCs already.
Also note that Titanfall 1 has no single player. The campaign is still multiplayer and as such dependent on multiplayer servers functioning properly.
Xbox
Xbox has and still is unaffected by these attacks. Multiplayer should work fine on the Xbox versions of the game.
With all that said, between blacklists, accusations, and DDOS attacks, 2021 saw a lot of chaos for the Titanfall community. However the release of Northstar hopefully marks the beginning of a brighter future.
One way or another see you on the Frontier, pilots! o7
Updates and changelog
2022-01-08: Fixed wrong information about state of TF|1 XBox
2022-01-09: Added information about South US Central Region