Tuesday morning was a bit of a nightmare for Blizzard Entertainment. They had put out a notice that they were experiencing another round of DDoS attacks; however, much like Illidan Stormrage had stated in his Harbingers animated short, they were prepared. Blizzard resolved the issues within ten minutes of making the announcement about being the subject of a DDoS attack. The attacks lead to World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Overwatch and other Blizzard titles becoming unplayable.
The hacking community PoodleCorp claimed responsibility for the attacks through their Twitter account, but there is no way to independently determine or confirm their role. The reasons given behind the DDoS attacks were due to players being banned for cheating, which was a stern practice Blizzard has adopted since the launch of their newest game Overwatch. PoodleCorp also took responsibility for Pokemon GO’s server outage back on July 16.
This has become Blizzard’s third DDoS attack against them since the launch of Overwatch. They are becoming more and more adept to handling these kinds of situations and have been resolving them in a timely manner. The aches didn’t end for Blizzard after the DDoS issue, though. Today, World of Warcraft was patched to increase the frequency of the demon invasions as this is the final week before the launch of the Legion expansion. The patch along with the subsequent server restart caused the game to become unplayable. Users who attempted to login were instantly greeted with an Error 134 ACCESS_VIOLATION error which crashed the client back to the desktop.
As of 11:00am EST, Blizzard has since fixed the issue, but that was something they certainly didn’t need on a day like today.
