Large DDoS Attack on Blizzard Took Down Diablo IV and Other Games

Blizzard fell victim to a significant DDoS attacks over the weekend affecting multiple games in their collection, which quickly became apparent as players could not connect to official servers.

DDoS attacks in the gaming industry have grown in scale, especially in the past few years, as more and more DDoS-for-hire services have appeared. Some people have used these services to slow down opponents by directing attacks against specific servers, but the Blizzard incident was a lot more extensive.

Starting Sunday morning, people worldwide began to report problems with the process of logging in to Diablo IV, the latest game from Blizzard. Issues ranged from an inability to log in to the game to warnings about missing licensing keys.

As more and more reports came in, the incident was actually present in other Blizzard titles. The company announced on Twitter that it was investigating the problems and, after a few hours, said that the login problems were solved. Still, many players had login issues, and that's when the studio said they were dealing with massive DDoS attacks.

"We are currently experiencing a DDoS attack, which may result in high latency and disconnections for some players," the announcement posted on the Battle.net PC client notes. "We are actively working to mitigate this issue."

Interestingly enough, Blizzard didn't seem able to do much mitigating as the next message on Twitter only said the following: "The DDOS attacks that we were monitoring have ended."

If a company as big as Blizzard, already with the necessary infrastructure to keep millions of concurrent players online, can't deal with DDoS attacks, imagine how extensive they must have been.

Diablo IV was only just released a couple of weeks ago, so other similar incidents will likely still take place. There's no indication of whom might be responsible for this string of attacks.