Three of the biggest gaming services on the planet have been down for parts of the weekend, with DDoS attacks hitting the servers of the PlayStation Network, Riot’s League of Legends and Blizzard’s Battle.net (affecting titles such as World of Warcraft and Hearthstone).
A DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack is when bots are used to flood a system (usually with external communications requests), overwhelming it and making it unusable.
Blizzard was hit on Saturday, with service mostly restored by early on Sunday morning
League of Legends was attacked on Saturday.
Sony’s issues have been ongoing (UPDATE: Sony says the PSN is pretty much back)
The DDoS attacks on Sony extended to Sony Online Entertainment servers, with SOE boss John Smedley tweeting:
We are under attack by a large scale ddos. Being dealt with but it will impact games until its handled.
— John Smedley (@j_smedley) August 24, 2014
Smedley would later be the subject of a bomb threat hoax on an aircraft he was travelling on.
https://kotaku.com/sony-online-presidents-flight-diverted-after-hacker-bom-1626249376
