GunZ is down with "Authentication fail" — and Masangsoft does not know why yet

Update — Aug 25: the server came back with the early-morning maintenance, which also shipped a large patch. See what changed. The cause of the outage was never officially explained. What follows is how the night of Aug 24 unfolded.

GunZ has been down since the evening of Sunday, August 24. Anyone trying to log in gets an “Authentication fail” message and never gets past the login screen.

So far, the game team cannot say why.

The first reports appeared on the Steam forums around 18:30 BRT (21:30 UTC), in Portuguese, English and Spanish at the same time — no single region can be isolated. (That timestamp is when complaints started appearing; the exact moment of failure was never disclosed.)

One player claimed on the forums that he could still log in on a second account while everyone else was stuck, which suggests a partial rather than total outage. It is a single, unverifiable report, but worth recording.

What the team said

At 19:52 BRT (22:52 UTC), on the official Discord, GM Dalmia answered players complaining they could not log in:

GM Dalmia on the official GunZ Discord, 19:52 BRT on Aug 24, 2026.

“We don’t know yet why the server is down. We are still waiting for confirmation from the staff, once we have an answer then we will share it.”

In other words: the outage was not planned. We checked the official channels at publishing time — Steam’s news API, the store RSS, the community RSS and Masangsoft’s own portal — and none of them acknowledged the problem in writing. More than two hours into the outage, the most recent posts were still the ones from that morning.

The silence departs from the company’s own procedure. Since launch, Masangsoft has published 14 incident notices on Steam, sometimes following up in under 30 minutes — on August 13, a notice went out at 21:17 BRT and the update at 21:46. The process exists; this time it was not used.

Worth noting the pattern: this is the fourth unscheduled interruption in twelve days of service. Before it came the connection problems and the emergency North American server reboot on Aug 15, plus the unscheduled maintenances on Aug 16 and Aug 18.

Careful: this is not the scheduled maintenance

The two are easy to mix up, so let’s separate them.

Masangsoft had already announced, on the morning of the 24th, a scheduled maintenance — but it only happens in the early hours of Tuesday:

• When: August 25, 00:00 to 02:00 PDT (07:00–09:00 UTC / 04:00–06:00 BRT)
• Expected duration: 2 hours
• Stated purpose: server stabilization and a regular update

The current outage, with “Authentication fail”, is something else — it started roughly nine hours before that window, with no warning.

One detail from the notice worth remembering for afterwards: Masangsoft asks that you close the Steam client and restart the game once the server is back.

What the August 25 patch brings

The same announcement carried the patch notes, and it is a big one. The highlights:

GunZ Plus finally arrives. It is the monetization model producer PD Max had promised with a guarantee of “absolutely zero Pay-to-Win”. The Optimite Shop opens alongside it.

The 30% EXP event ends. It is replaced by a 30% BT event. If you were counting on the experience bonus to grind levels, the window closes at the maintenance.

New mode: Clan Scrum Match, letting designated clans practise clan battles against each other — the first concrete step toward the Clan Wars the company has been promising.

Fixes and stability:

• dagger animation being interrupted on female characters when chaining a jump attack after a charged attack;
• package items not being consumed when clicking “use”;
• HP below 1 displaying as 0 (it now shows the decimal value);
• frame drops when completing in-game achievements;
• stability improvements to reduce unexpected crashes.

Three new package costumes, new Credit costumes, three costumes converted to Credit purchases and a tutorial-mode shortcut help UI round out the patch.

Why some indicators say “online” while the game won’t open

This is the part that confuses people, and it is worth explaining — not least because it affects our own indicator on this site.

The “players online” number shown on GunZ Brasil comes from Steam’s official API. But that API counts who has the game open, not who managed to reach the server. During an authentication failure, everyone sitting on the error screen is still counted.

Worse: we queried that API twice, fifteen minutes apart, and it returned exactly the same number both times — a sign of a cached response. So on top of measuring the wrong thing, the value is not always instantaneous.

The result: while a large part of the community could not play, Steam was still reporting nearly 400 people with GunZ running. An automatic indicator looking at that number would conclude “everything is fine”.

The official site has no status indicator

Here is the part that probably confused a lot of people today.

We went looking for the “official site indicator” supposedly showing the game as up. It does not exist. We checked the rendered page, the raw HTML, the site’s route table and the JavaScript build files: there is no server status indicator anywhere on the official site. Paths like /status and /server-status do respond, but they return the same generic page any made-up path returns.

Anyone seeing “online” was looking at a third-party tracker. The two that surface on Google:

• A popular status aggregator was showing “OPERATIONAL, 100% uptime today” at the exact moment nobody could log in. The explanation is written on its own page: monitoring comes from user complaints, not from probing the server — and an hour only turns “degraded” at 6 or more complaints. Since GunZ’s player base is small, nobody complains there, the counter stays at zero and the badge stays green. That site’s game entry still lists the wrong publisher and a 2004 release date.
• A fan site with a “server status” page said “servers up”, verified six days earlier. It is a static page: the status text is baked into the code and only changes if someone edits it by hand.

Neither one tests the GunZ server. And there is a telling detail: the official site itself published neither tomorrow’s maintenance notice nor the patch notes — its most recent post is from August 22. In practice Masangsoft communicates through Steam and Discord; the official site is not a reliable notice channel (its homepage is currently rendering “The post does not exist.” where the announcements should be).

That is why we just changed two things here:

1. Scheduled maintenance is no longer treated as an ongoing problem. A notice about maintenance planned for tomorrow does not mean the game is broken right now.
2. We can now flag the server as down manually. When the community knows people cannot get in — like right now — the site says so immediately, instead of waiting for an API to notice or for an official statement hours later.

In practice: if the indicator next to the logo is red and reads “server down”, it is because we confirmed the problem is real.

What to do now

There is not much a player can do: “Authentication fail” is a server-side problem, not your account and not your installation. Reinstalling does not help — one player uninstalled and redownloaded the whole game during the outage and hit the same error. As of publishing, nobody reported a workaround that worked.

One important distinction, so two different problems do not get mixed up: there is another failure, older than this one, where the game hangs on “Logging in…” and drops with “Disconnected from the server”. That one has affected some players since launch, and the workaround the community reports as effective is using a VPN (exiting through South Korea or Japan). If your error is today’s “Authentication fail”, though, a VPN will not help — the problem is on the other end.

The causes circulating on the forums — early maintenance, a staggered regional rollout, a new attack — are all player speculation, with no official backing whatsoever. We are not going to repeat any of them as if they were information.

The most likely outcome is that the server returns along with the early-morning maintenance. Follow our status page, which shows the official notices in real time, and keep an eye on the community Discord — that is where the information showed up first this time.

We will update this article once there is an official position.