Two Wii U titles has been taken offline by Nintendo recently to fix some security issues.
The Wii U titles that went offline were Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon. Nintendo is currently investigating and trying to fix what it claims to be a security vulnerability. They were taken offline at 8:30 PM PT/ 11:30 PM ETT on Thursday. The company says it might be days before they will put them back online.
“We have identified vulnerabilities with online play for [these] network [services] and have begun temporary emergency maintenance,” the message said on the official website. “We expect an extended maintenance duration while we address these issues and have not determined when online play will resume. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate your understanding.”
Nintendo dataminer OatmealDome recently posted on their Twitter account to reveal the contents of the security issue that Nintendo did not disclose. They said that the issue is “almost certainly” the exploit called ENLBufferPwn. It allows the attacker to take over someone’s console execute code on it, just by playing against them online.
YouTuber PabloMK7 recenlty posted a video that shows how the exploit works on Mario Kart 7 on the 3DS. This got patched recently to prevent this problem.
No word yet on when the two Wii U games will be coming back online.