Blizzard has confirmed a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS (opens in new tab)) attack was the root of the troubles that plagued users trying to log into its Battle.net (opens in new tab) site.
“We are currently experiencing a DDoS attack, which may result in high latency and disconnections for some players. We are actively working to mitigate this issue,” wrote (opens in new tab) the company on Twitter, shortly before sharing that the attacks had ceased (opens in new tab) and all operations had been normalized.
According to The Verge (opens in new tab), the DDoS campaign lasted about an hour and prevented users from logging into Blizzard’s Battle.net online service that powers titles such as Overwatch (opens in new tab), Call of Duty: Warzone (opens in new tab), Hearthstone (opens in new tab), and more.
A one-off?
A little digging around revealed that although outage reports spiked across a number of Blizzard properties, with thousands of users reporting that Battle.net was down, a relatively lesser number complained about individual Blizzard games losing service.
The limited hue and cry leads The Verge to believe that the outage wasn’t universal, and perhaps didn’t affect a majority of the gamers (opens in new tab).
It’s been several hours since Blizzard noted that services on Battle.net have resumed. However, even though it has admitted to being at the receiving end of a DDoS campaign, Blizzard hasn’t yet shared any details about the attack.
In fact, we aren’t even sure if the attack ended naturally, or if was Blizzard's proactive corrective measures that thwarted the campaign.
DDoS attacks on popular online services aren’t new. However, with the recent campaign against Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) (opens in new tab) providers that were dubbed "unprecedented (opens in new tab)" by Comms Council UK, it remains to be seen if the attack on Battle.net was a one-off, or part of the attackers plan to test waters in preparation of follow-up attacks in the future.
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