Earlier today, members of the infamous Lizard Squad hacking crew carried out a series of coordinated attacks on a number of Blizzard's servers, knocking some servers offline, or causing latency issues for a few hours.
The incident started at around 03:00 AM [GMT] and targeted Blizzard's EU and US servers. Games like World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, and Hearthstone suffered connectivity and latency issues.
As you'd expect from latency-crazed gamers, the attack was quickly blasted all over Twitter, and later Blizzard's Battle.net forums.
Blizzard tech support was alerted and provided the following statement on the Battle.net forum:
“ 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. ”
The attack came almost two months after a Forbes reporter put out a story claiming that the grey hat hackers that created a benevolent string of malware (Linux.Wifatch) were trying to hijack Lizard Squad's DDoSing botnet.Lizard Squad didn't hesitate and took official responsibility for the attacks through a series of tweets sent out during the attacks.
US Blizzard #Offline - WoW #Offline, Diablo 3 #Offline, Starcraft 2 #Offline, Hearthstone #Offline @fbiarelosers @AppleJ4ckxoxo — Lizard Squad (@LizardLands) April 14, 2016
EU Blizzard #Offline - WoW #Offline, Diablo 3 #Offline, Starcraft 2 #Offline, Hearthstone #Offline @fbiarelosers @AppleJ4ckxoxo — Lizard Squad (@LizardLands) April 14, 2016
We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting connections to our games. https://t.co/YsDZ0CYdFX — BlizzardCS (@BlizzardCS) April 14, 2016