A number of Blizzard games including Diablo IV were inaccessible over the weekend following a DDoS attack that left some users without access.
Following a number of Reddit comments concerning downtime, the company took to Twitter to announce that it was investigating an issue affecting its authentication servers, which it said “may result in failed or slow login attempts.” One user commented on the thread that the issue started around midnight Eastern US time.
Several hours later, Blizzard confirmed that the outage was indeed due to a DDoS attack, adding “We continue to actively monitor an ongoing DDOS attack which is affecting latency/connections to our games.”
Blizzard outage
According to comments in the company’s first Tweet about the issue, affected users were receiving a variety of unexplained error codes. At the time, Blizzard said: “Players may experience queues while we work on the issue.”
Fortunately, Blizzard’s customer support channel confirmed that the attacks had ended on the same day that it had first notified users, but by then, many players’ Sundays were drawing to a close.
Currently, it’s unclear which threat actor may be behind the DDoS attack that flooded Blizzard’s servers with high volumes of Internet traffic. The company did not immediately respond to TechRadar Pro’s request for an update on the DDoS attack, but from what we can tell, servers and games are back to normal.
Although the attacks have ended, Blizzard has indirectly suggested that some users may still be affected, directing users who cannot log in to follow basic troubleshooting steps.
Blizzard’s Battle.net platform is, as players will know, a frequent victim of DDoS attacks for reasons often unknown, but the company is typically fast to react as it looks to keep gamers online.
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