Japanese arcades are missing some of their loudest cabinets. Sega Fave’s ALL.net online network and Aime player-card service have been offline since 3 p.m. Japan time on Nov. 1 after a third party gained unauthorized access, Kotaku reports, and the outage is still dragging into a third day.
ALL.net is the backbone that lets arcade machines talk to the internet for online matches, leaderboards and shared save data. Aime is the NFC card system players tap to carry profiles between cabinets. Sega runs both, and licenses Aime to other publishers, which is why Bandai Namco titles such as Taiko no Tatsujin and Idolm@ster TOURS are caught in the same blackout alongside Sega’s own Initial D: The Arcade.
Sega says it is investigating how far the intrusion went. In the meantime the company has already said customer and business-partner data was not breached, and that payment information was not stored on the affected servers. A Nov. 2 update warned that the probe is expected to take some time, with no restoration date attached.
For rhythm and racing fans, that is more than an inconvenience. Many modern Japanese arcade games are built around always-online features, so operators have been roping machines off or forcing limited offline modes. Social posts have shown half-empty floors where Taiko cabinets would normally be packed after school and late into the night.
The timing is ugly because the same services only recently came back from another multi-day shutdown at the end of October, when Sega addressed a PHP security problem — the same class of issue that recently pushed Capcom to temporarily delist Street Fighter 5 and shut off its servers. When ALL.net and Aime returned, Sega limited access to Japan-only connections, frustrating the overseas fan base that travels for these games.
For now, arcades and players are stuck waiting on Sega Fave’s investigation. Until ALL.net and Aime are clean and back online, some of Japan’s biggest coin-op draws remain dark or half-broken.
