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Rainbow Six Siege’s 2023 holiday event featured Freeze For All, a limited-time mode announced for the Operation Deep Freeze season and scheduled to run through January 5, 2024. Around the same period, players reported connection failures, disconnections, matchmaking problems and crashes. Ubisoft Support acknowledged connectivity issues affecting some players and said it was investigating, but the available statements do not establish that the event caused the problems or explain how the incident ended.
What was the Rainbow Six Siege Holiday 2023 event?
Ubisoft announced Freeze For All as a limited-time holiday event during Operation Deep Freeze. The free-for-all took place on a new Arctic Workshop map, where players respawned on rooftops and could throw snowballs. Ubisoft advertised event bundles and a free Collection pack as part of the festivities, which were announced to continue through January 5, 2024. Ubisoft’s December 2023 announcement also said the free Holiday Pack was available from December 22, 2023, through January 3, 2024. It contained one random Operator the player did not own, or a Bravo Pack if the player already owned every Operator.
Freeze For All was one element of the broader Operation Deep Freeze season, not a separate game or a technical service notice. Ubisoft’s season announcement also listed the new Operator Tubarão and his Zoto Canisters, the Lair map, a Marketplace beta, Reputation System changes, balancing, and a Versus AI playlist. A contemporaneous Gamepressure explainer described the mode as ten players without teams, with five two-minute rounds, randomly assigned classes and a points-based winner; those detailed rules come from secondary coverage.
What connectivity problems did players describe?
In contemporaneous discussion, players described several kinds of trouble: being unable to connect or find a match, disconnecting during a session or failing to reconnect, and crashes. Some also mentioned abandonment penalties. These are examples from individual accounts in a Reddit thread, not a representative survey, verified incident count or evidence that every report had the same cause. The thread includes the varied player reports alongside a statement attributed to Ubisoft Support.
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What did Ubisoft confirm?
Ubisoft Support, as reproduced in the Reddit thread, said: “We are aware of a situation affecting our online services causing connectivity issues for some players in Rainbow Six Siege. Our teams are actively investigating to bring a resolution to you as soon as possible.” This confirms that Ubisoft was aware of connectivity issues affecting some players and was investigating when the statement was posted. It does not identify the cause, affected platforms or regions, the scale of the issue, or a final resolution.
Did Freeze For All cause the connection issues?
The event and the connectivity reports overlapped in time, but that alone does not show that Freeze For All caused the instability. The available announcement presents the event and its features; the reproduced support statement acknowledges connectivity problems without connecting them to the mode. Ubisoft’s later 2023 connectivity retrospective discusses how service interruptions can involve multiple areas, including services, matchmaking, servers, providers, update features and deployment processes. It does not assign a cause to the late-December reports.
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What does Ubisoft’s 2023 outage history add?
The retrospective provides context about earlier disruptions, not an explanation of the holiday-period complaints. Ubisoft reported the following unplanned downtime for other 2023 incidents:
| Period | Ubisoft-reported downtime | Scope stated by Ubisoft |
|---|---|---|
| January 2023 | 15 hours and 54 minutes | Unplanned downtime |
| April 2023 | 7 hours | Unplanned outages across three incidents |
| August 2023 | 17 hours and 49 minutes | Downtime associated with the Y8S3 launch outage |
Ubisoft said the August outage followed the launch of Operation Heavy Mettle and arose from conditions that left services unable to handle the high number of players trying to connect. It also said it temporarily disabled Rank information delivery while Rank calculations continued. That is an account of the August event only; it does not establish what happened in December.
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What is known—and not known—about the late-December incident?
- Known: Ubisoft Support acknowledged connectivity issues affecting some players and said teams were investigating.
- Reported by players: The thread includes accounts of connection and matchmaking failures, disconnections, reconnect problems, crashes and abandonment penalties.
- Not established: The available sources do not provide a reliable player-impact count, event-specific crash rate, definitive root cause, or final official explanation or resolution for the late-December reports.
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