Update: PUBG's official Twitter account has stated that an error causing random players to be banned from the game has been fixed, and that any accounts banned mistakenly have been reinstated. However, players are claiming they're still locked out of the game, so perhaps the fix will take a while to feed through.

It looks like the initial problem lasted about six hours or so—it was caused by an update to the game's anti-cheat service earlier today.

Scroll down for the original story.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' hacker problem is well documented, and developer Bluehole is constantly pushing updates to the game's anti-cheat system in order to catch the worst offenders. Unfortunately, the latest update has resulted in some friendly fire, with scores of players claiming they've been banned without ever having cheated. The developer has confirmed that the update is "temporarily preventing some players from accessing our game".

Numerous Twitter users on this thread uploaded screenshots of a ban message, which said they were banned because of "abnormal game logs" and "too many suspected complaints for using illegal software".

Some players in this Reddit thread who were initially banned are now able to play again, so if it's happened to you, I'd try again in a few hours. I imagine it'd be really frustrating getting banned for cheating when you've done nothing wrong, especially when you see other players in the game blatantly hacking, zooming around the map at five times their normal speed (which is one I've come across), or auto-headshotting people.

To give an idea of the scale of the problem, the game banned more than one million players in January, including 100,000 in a single wave. It's truly a mammoth task—last month, the official account of the game's anti-cheat service said that despite the bans "things continue to escalate".

The Playerunknown's Battlegrounds test servers will return this week with a new build of the game incorporating a friend system, voice chat in the main menu, and a "limb penetration system." That last point might sound like some behind-the-scenes technical mumbo-jumbo, but it's actually important: It means player will no longer be able to block incoming shots with their hands. 

It's not that people were actively blocking bullets like Amazon warriors on a regular basis, but under the old system an incoming round would only damage whichever body part it hit first—so a hand or an arm that moved at at a pivotal moment could drastically reduce the damage from a hit that would otherwise ruin your day.   

Specifics on how the new penetration system will work weren't revealed but I'd expect that the shots will continue on their original trajectory into your skull/chest/naughty bits/whatever else tops your list of places you'd really rather not be shot in, and do some amount of reduced damage on secondary impact.   

The in-game friend system should be a big plus too. As for voice chat, well, it's nice to be able to talk to people, but we know how these things sometimes work out. PUBG Corp said the test server patch notes will be posted in a couple of days.

Nvidia has made available its 391.01 WHQL driver release for GeForce GPUs, and with it comes 'Game Ready' optimizations for Final Fantasy XV, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, and World of Tanks 1.0.

With regards to PUBG, Nvidia performed some internal benchmarking and found that GeForce GTX 1050 owners stand to see a 7 percent performance increase at 1920x1080. Likewise, Nvidia's benchmarks highlight the same performance gain for GeForce GTX 1080 owners at 2560x1440 and 3824x2160, and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti owners at 3840x2160.

Here's a look at the full set of data:

Bear in mind that these are Nvidia's benchmarks, not our own. That said, the testbed Nvidia used consisted of an Intel Core i7-7820X processor paired with 32GB of DDR4-2666 memory, running in Windows 10. A beefy system, in other words.

As for Final Fantasy XV, a version for PC is launching a week from tomorrow. It will arrive to Windows with 4K support "and a ton of other enhancements and additions" that Nvidia was eager to point out, such as Turf Effects and HairWorks.

Nvidia spent some time stomping out bugs with this latest driver release. Here is a rundown of the fixed issues: 

• [BeamNG]: Dynamic reflections flicker in the game.
• [Call of Duty WWII]: Flickering shadows occur in the game.
• NvfbcPluginWindow prevents Windows from shutting down.
• Booting from a cold boot results in black screen on a multi-monitor system.
• [3DVision]: System shutdown time increases when Stereoscopic 3D is enabled.
• [Nvidia Control Panel]: The Display->Adjust desktop color settings->Content type setting is reset to “Auto-selected” after rebooting the system.
• [GeForce GTX 980/1080 Ti]: OpenGL program may crash when trying to map a buffer object.
• [Notebook][GeForce GTX 965M]: Drop in GPU performance occurs.

Follow this link to grab the new driver package.