It is little surprise then, that the cause of a sweeping disruption that struck Blizzard games such as World of Warcraft and Diablo was the result of a DDoS attack.
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The DDoS attack affected nearly all players using the Battle.Net service, with widespread reports of connection problems, lag and timeouts.
DDoS, which stands for Distributed Denial of Service, refers to an intentional torrent of traffic that’s created to cripple a company’s servers.
The group has also posted images that appear to show it has gained access to the personal accounts of some Blizzard employees. When the waters finally calmed, Blizzard took to Twitter with the following message. All Battle.net games were offline for an indeterminate amount of time last night and this morning.
If you have your credit card details stored in your Battle.net account, don’t worry: Blizzard says that since the ne’er-do-wells responsible for this hack were simply spamming bad requests at servers; user account information has not been breached. By about 11:45 p.m., Blizzard sent out the above tweet giving gamers the all clear to jump back online.
If you were hoping to play World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, or any other Blizzard title last night, you probably had issues connecting.
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“It looks like we experienced a potential DDoS on one of our data centres”. Initial impact appears to have ended and our engineers put up some buffers to resolve the issue, and realms should start recovering. “We’re continuing to monitor and work on mitigating the impact”, wrote support forum agent, Glaxigrav.
