Update—10:40 a.m.: With grace, felicity and no pity for this post’s short-lived relevance, Blizzard resolved their server issues ten minutes post-publication. Read below for background on today’s now-fixed DDoS attack against Battle.net.
A DDoS attack this morning crippled Blizzard’s Battle.net servers, according to Blizzard’s official Twitter account. Overwatch, Hearthstone, World of Warcraft and other Blizzard titles were briefly unavailable for play. The hack comes at the end of Overwatch’s Summer Games event, the beginning of which was also marred by a DDoS attack on August 2nd.
The hacker collective PoodleCorp took credit for the previous August DDoS attack against Blizzard, though there is no way to independently confirm their role. Allegedly, the hackers were throwing a shit fit about being banned for cheating. PoodleCorp also took responsibility for Pokémon Go’s server outage on July 16th.
Today’s DDoS attack had players waiting over an hour to connect to a Blizzard title on Battle.net. Blizzard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A few Overwatch fans are speculating that the outage was intentional on Blizzard’s part. As it is August 23rd, and the alleged next Overwatch hero, the hacker Sombra, will be the game’s 23rd hero, a few more paranoid players think today’s DDoS was a highly inconvenient publicity stunt. Kotaku has heard nothing to indicate this possibility, which frankly seems far-fetched.
This is Blizzard’s third DDoS attack since Overwatch’s May launch. The last few were resolved within a few hours.