Eve Online and Dust 514 are still down following yesterday's DDOS attack

Update #2: Eve Online players have been compensated with 50,000 free, unallocated skill points to do what they will with. That gift is only for people with fully active Eve accounts. Trial users will get an extra seven days free play time.

It doesn't look like Dust 514 players will get anything, though.

The skill points were dished out during the Eve Online: Odyssey expansion roll-out yesterday. 50,000 skill points, I'm informed, is judged to be about a day's worth of training - so not inconsiderable.

Update: Eve Online and Dust 514 are back online.

"What we can now confirm is that a person was able to utilize a vulnerability in one of the back-end services that support the operation of the Tranquility server," CCP explained. "This vulnerability has now been secured and thoroughly tested.

"We would like to stress that at no time was customer data compromised or accessible in any way.

"We will be looking at ways to compensate players in both Eve and Dust for the outage and expect to announce what that compensation will be very soon."

Original story: The Tranquility cluster of servers that hosts Eve Online and Dust 514 have been taken down following a DDOS attack.

It occurred very early Sunday morning but the servers are still down today.

The latest word from game maker CCP, given two hours ago on Twitter (and Facebook), is, "Our engineers are close to resolving the issues on Tranquility. We aim to have have our servers live as soon as we possibly can."

A CCP statement about the attack, reposted on Alex "The Mittani" Gianturco's site, said: "At 02:05 GMT June 2nd, CCP became aware of a significant and sustained distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS) against the Tranquility cluster (which houses EVE Online and DUST 514) and web servers.

"Our policy in such cases is to mobilise a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation. At 03:07 GMT, that group concluded that our best course of action was to go completely offline while we put in place mitigation plans.

"While we initially reopened EVE Online and DUST 514, we have since re-evaluated. With the highest sense of precaution we have taken Tranquility and associated websites back down for further investigation and an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure. ... an extended service interruption of several hours is expected as this process should not be rushed."