Among Us developers are trying to prevent a hack from disrupting games

An in-game announcement warns Among Us players of emergency maintennance
(Image credit: Innersloth)

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".

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 and Kotaku 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.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.