Sorry Wii U users, but Nintendo have pulled Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon from online, saying it’s for “urgent maintenance”, said to be regarding a security issue. It’s not known when or if they will be back.
With Mar10 Day, the annual celebration of all things Mario on March 10, looming, you would expect Nintendo to be making fixing the situation a priority. But even if there aren’t too many players rocking the old-school racer on Wii U these days, Nintendo don’t offer much hope on their server operational status page, saying, “We do not yet have information on when network services can be restored. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
Nintendo dataminer OatmealDome believe it is all due to the ENLBufferPwn vulnerability “which could allow an attacker to take over your console just by connecting to them online”.
They also say, “This exploit affected many of Nintendo’s games on the Switch, along with Mario Kart 7 on the 3DS. Patches to fix the bug were released last year for affected Switch games and Mario Kart 7, but Splatoon 1 (above) and Mario Kart 8 (top) did not receive any despite being known to be vulnerable. It appears Nintendo have now taken the servers down to prevent people from being exploited.”
