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.
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.
Comments
45 responses to “Online Attacks Cripple Sony’s PSN, League Of Legends, Blizzard Games”
What exactly is this supposed to prove? Is there any point to this?
I read somewhere that it was linked to ISIS, or something to do with the stuff happening overseas.
Another guy came out and said he did it, and that lizard/isis group couldn’t hack their way out of a wet paper bag, they’re just claiming credit.
I’m not convinced he is responsible either.
Half the time the people who do this are happy to stay quiet and let the authorities chase the glory monkeys instead haha.
The guy wanted to prove to everyone that Sony could get attacked and should be spending more money to prevent it.
Anyone can be attacked……..
Sony, LoL and Blizzard are 3 of the most highly used online services in the world.
There is no point to this, just a bunch of bored teenagers or 40 year old virgins.
They won’t be virgins for long once they get caught and thrown in prison.
Preventing a DDOS? Really?
Yes, the reason he DDoS them is to prove to the world that they need to spend more money on security to prevent DDos attacks from people like him.
So then what was the point of the bomb threat hoax?
http://taimapedia.org/images/2/2d/Exploding_yellow_van.gif
Security stops our data being accessed, which it was successful in doing. It will not stop a DDOS however….
It wasn’t just Sony, and secondly, there is still no point to it. They only have to spend more protection money because of a-holes like the person who did it. Which means that we would have to pay more as consumers….
Sony are already charging you more money spurred by how crap PSN was before the last massive hack. Before that it was free.
But anybody can do a DDOS attack. They could have targeted anyone, and stopped that companies functionality…. It has little to do with the security of Sony (considering it wasn’t just Sony who were targeted), and more to do with masking their own identity, that’s would be the only ‘clever’ thing to do here.
No information was accessed, just a DDOS. Quite pathetic really.
I’m not agreeing with them, I’m just giving their poorly explained reason.
Apparently ISIS is behind this
Is this Saturday time Australia or U.S.? My login issues occurred on Sunday arvo to evening.
Same here.
Same. No more than 1 hour stable playing time before another DDOS wave hit the Blizz servers.
Definitely Oz Sunday. Had a couple of Hearthstone disconnects.
Potentially the whole weekend. Guild Wars 2 was getting hit on Saturday our time.
i was waiting to see how long it would take Kotaku to pick up on this story, turns out a while lol
yes, had major issues on Sunday in WoW
I was on an awesome Heartstone streak, you fuckers!
I try not to swear like that, but they really put a damper on me fiddling with my new cards yesterday.
D3 connection issues galore yesterday, kicked, queues of upto 100 minutes, dropouts and lag.
…Sounds completely normal to me…
I was wondering why my PS4 was taking so long to turn on. I think it was trying to establish a connection that wasn’t there. I was this close to reformatting/wiping the whole thing. Hopefully it will be right at rain by the time I get back tonight.
A group called Lizard Squad are claiming responsibility for these attacks, they have a twitter feed which has some of the ISIS images that are leading people to the ISIS connection.
If they are the actual people doing it, or just claiming credit who knows.
Why?
Sunday afternoon for us here is AUS. i couldnt even get online for a lot of the day.
Battle.net looks to be down again right now. Was just about to get my last Northrend pet battle victory in too, dammit!
Aaaaaaaaaaand we’re back!
And down again. Le sigh.
Are these the same guys hitting GW2/NCsoft? GW2s been hit by DDoSes around about midnight for the last several days
Weird, @Longjocks and I were playing Diablo 3 on PS4 pretty much all weekend and at least I didn’t notice a hint of trouble, must have been my DDOS Evading Leather Armour Of The Bear
It may have just been things like the PSN store, which is always slow and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between normal operation and when it’s being crippled by an attack.
Might explain why I still haven’t heard back from Blizzard about my damn battle.net account…
Hmm, so maybe that’s why i couldn’t log in last night when i booted up my PS3.
I was still getting disconnects from WoW early Sunday evening. A real shame considering me and a bunch of mates have only really just got back into the game and we were keen to try some raiding. Sunday was going to our raiding day.
Ah so this is why I had troubles connecting to D3 parties on the weekend.
Sony are lucky this didn’t happen a little closer to the launch of Destiny. I would expect that a complete server crash for one of this years most anticipated ALWAYS ONLINE games at launch would be bad news.
So, I don’t know, maybe Sony needs to look at it’s security and stability a bit more closely…but what a jerk way of doing it. My friends and I just started Diablo 3 on the PS4…sure we can each play on our own, but there goes the fun of co-op for now (sigh, first world problems)
Is there even a way to prevent a denial of service attack?
Attacks on Blizzard are still ongoing. I had trouble logging in and latency issues with WoW till about an hour ago.
Always some people defending this juvenile crap…. seriously… grow up