The online services of a number of Japanese arcade games, including heavy hitters such as Bandai Namco’s Taiko no Tatsujin and Sega’s Initial D: The Arcade, have been forced offline due to a widespread hack of online services ALL.net and Aime. As of November 1st at 3 p.m. local time in Japan, all services involving these networks have been affected, while Sega Fave—the Sega subsidiary in charge of the service—investigates the breach.
The ALL.net service is an online network that allows machines in Japanese arcades to connect to the internet, providing online matches, online leaderboards, sharing save data and other similar services. Meanwhile, Aime is a service working with NFC cards that stores player information, tapped at any machine for use. The account number on these cards can then be accessed online by Sega to verify this information. Though this is a service provided by Sega service, the tool is also licensed by companies like Bandai Namco for Idolm@ster TOURS and Taiko no Tatsujin, and by Sega themselves for non-arcade services such as their Lucky Kuji Online random prize service.
According to Sega, a third party gained unauthorized access to these services, and the company is now investigating to learn the extent of the situation. In the meantime, the services are down, but Sega is already confirming that no customer or business partner data has been breached, and that payment information was not stored on the affected servers.
For many of the most popular games in Japanese arcades, especially rhythm games, this service is vital to their operation. This is obviously seriously affecting arcades which cannot operate the machines. Two days later, this service has yet to return, with many social media users sharing images of arcades with many of their usually-bustling machines blocked from public use. Others are limiting games to offline use only to allow some games to remain playable during the outage. Sega updated its notice November 2 to say the investigation is expected to take some time to complete.
早く治ってー pic.twitter.com/7ZVVfF5WzI
— はるぼー (@harutaiko2405) November 2, 2026
The nature of the unauthorized access has yet to be disclosed, and the incident follows Sega taking down the same service for multiple days at the end of last month in order to address the PHP exploit. In response to this, the company also chose to reopen the service by limiting access to Aime and ALL.net services only to Japan, much to the complaints of the growing contingent of international fans of these arcade games. Now, the games are offline once again, with no clear date as to when they will resume service.
