For several days now, players of Among Us have been regularly encountering a hack that fills lobbies with bots who spam the same message repeatedly, despawns everything leaving players in a black room, and finally disconnects them from the game. The messages have had various versions of similar text, typically telling players to subscribe to the hacker's YouTube channel "or else we will kill your device", followed by a link to either their Discord or Twitter, signing off "Trump 2020".
Reminder!! Please play private games or with people that you trust!!! We're doing what we can!!October 23, 2020
Developers Innersloth pushed out an emergency server update to deal with the issue and advised players to "Please play private games or with people that you trust!!!" People continued seeing the hack, now with messages like "You're mad I'm back" and "Paid by Putin from Russia". A second round of fixes followed, and the back-and-forth is likely to continue.
Both Eurogamer (opens in new tab) and Kotaku (opens in new tab) made contact with the hacker in question, who told Eurogamer they design and sell in-game cheats and consider this "a publicity stunt", claiming to have affected 1.5 million matches. Speaking to Kotaku, they made it sound like simple trolling, saying, "The anger and hatred is the part that makes it funny. If you care about a game and are willing to go and spam dislike some random dude on the internet because you cant play it for 3 minutes, it's stupid."
The hacker has since been doxxed, their name and address made public on Twitter.
During the week, over 400,000 people tuned in to watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez play Among Us on Twitch (opens in new tab).
