Last night, Battle.net, Blizzard’s tool for launching games and connecting gamer accounts across all of their I.P.s went offline and all Blizzard games became unavailable to play in the US and EU regions. This came as the result of a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on one of Blizzard’s main data centers. The hacking group Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for the attacks. Lizard Squad is also responsible for the PSN and Xbox Live outages that occurred in 2014 around Christmas time.
Official Tweet from Lizard Squad
While no true reason was claimed by Lizard Squad, many are attributing this attack to Blizzard’s decision to issue a cease and desist letter with intent to prosecute for licensing infringement to the owners of the Nostalrius private server. The server was set up to run the vanilla version of World of Warcraft so that fans of the original 2004 version of the game can indulge in a bit of nostalgia and enjoy the game for what it used to be. The shutdown of the server has caused a massive outpouring from the gaming community with such examples as Boogie2988, and JonTron coming forward and using their YouTube platforms to call Blizzard out on this decision (Warning: Some of the videos contain mature language).
Blizzard has released the following official statement:
“It looks like we experienced a potential DDoS on one of our datacenters. 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. Apologies for the inconvenience, and we’ll be sure to provide updates as they continue to come in.”
At the time of this writing Battle.net is back online and their games are playable once again.
