If you’re a fan of Blizzard’s roster of games, you might have noticed that Battle.net — particularly for World of Warcraft — were down earlier this morning.
The developer has since confirmed why: their data centres and servers were subject to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, with the infamous group Lizard Squad taking responsibility.
News of the outage began circulating social media and the Battle.net forums, with users reporting that their World of Warcraft servers and all characters within were lagging out. Users were eventually disconnected from their servers, and it soon became clear that something was wrong with Battle.net more broadly.
A member of Blizzard’s support team confirmed that a “potential DDoS” had been levied against one of the company’s data centres a few hours ago, and Blizzard’s support account on Twitter said that they were monitoring an attack “against network providers”.
We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting connections to our games. https://t.co/YsDZ0CYdFX
— BlizzardCS (@BlizzardCS) April 14, 2016
Lizard Squad, as they have done in previous outages, took responsibility for the attack over Twitter.
EU Blizzard #Offline – WoW #Offline, Diablo 3 #Offline, Starcraft 2 #Offline, Hearthstone #Offline @fbiarelosers @AppleJ4ckxoxo
— Lizard Squad (@LizardLands) April 14, 2016
Another Blizzard representative added they weren’t going to acknowledge any groups who took responsibility “to reduce visibility”.
The effect of the attacks appeared to cease shortly after 2:00 PM. Blizzard’s continuing to investigate the attacks and a thread on the saga, which ran to 39 pages, has since been locked.
Did you have any troubles logging into Battle.net today?
Comments
29 responses to “Blizzard Gets DDoS’D, Lizard Squad Takes Responsibility”
Well done guys, you took down some servers and accomplished nothing other than harming people who wanted to play those games.
Great job, true heroes.
It’s ironic that I had to think for a second to tell if you were addressing Blizzard of the hackers.
Hah, I didn’t think of it that way. Guess it applies to both though.
Of course Blizzard won’t acknowledge the group, the media will go above and beyond giving them all the visibility they want.
I had figured after the airplane fiasco more of its members got what was coming to them. Guess not?
That was my reaction too. It’s just as bad as those articles that talk about the controversy surrounding something while plastering footage and images about said controversy all over the article in order to attract people from both sides. One side wanting to see more of it and others getting inflamed and wanting to vent in the comments.
Guessing this action is in response to Nostalrius being taken down?
I’m thinking so ay. I don’t understand why they couldn’t just let it exist
mostly because it is pirating and copyright infrigment (private servers dont come under fair use), WoW isnt free and private servers require money to run
Feel like you could twist it to be under parody. The servers were paid for by the people running the server, they were not accepting ‘donations’ on a consistant basis. There were I think two maybe three times they asked for money as they themselves did not have the means to fund it at those intervals, and I believe all unused money they couldn’t refund they either sent to charity or pooled it into the next bill roll over. Either way the servers weren’t hurting blizzard in any way as they were not trying to be a competitor.
I guess you could argue that they were taking away from the playerbase of blizzard run retail WoW, but I feel like that’s REALLY arguing semantics.
If you don’t protect your IP from small harmless things, than the big harmful things can call precedent.
They had a hiss fit because their illegal servers were rightfully taken down.
Lizard Squad aren’t motivated by fighting for the underdog, they are motivated by screwing people over. They are the bully who kicked over your sandcastle when you where six. It’s not to prove a point or cry out for somebody else it’s to destroy something because it’s there and spread misery.
At the end of the day Blizzard aren’t going to lose money from these attacks. Nobody is Cancelling a Overwatch pre-order or demanding a refund for Legion. Nobody stopped their WoW sub over a day offline, people curse these fucktards and move on.
i for one, will not be preodering Legion anymore. not because of this, but the whole bit of disgusting hate towards its early player base, which is what anyone playing on private servers is, the vanilla player base(for the most part), there are dozens of private servers that are PAY TO WIN and BEG YOU TO SPEND MONEY, but this one, nah this one, nope, not this one, blizzard was being that bully of a big brother that got bored with his old toy, then when he sees you playing with it and actually still enjoying it, he rips it from your hands and tells you, YOU DONT WANT TO PLAY VANILLA WOW, #YOUTHINKYOUDOBUTYOUDON’T
have a good day, /endrant
But Blizzard have to defend their IP, if they don’t it sets a precedent that anyone can steal it.
Your example is terrible but. It’s not your little Brother playing with your old toy. It’s somebody stealing your old toy and enjoying it. The IP wasn’t given out for people to use. This is why Fan projects are shut down, Company X might not care about people doing Game 1 HD. But if they let somebody get away with distributing Game 1 HD for free they open themselves up to somebody selling Game 1, 2 & 3 pirates and losing the rights to that IP because they never defended it from the fans.
People who DDOS are garbage from the lowest tiers of the internet.
Ddos’ing an old game like this, where people are general alright to eachother; is basically the same as picking on a senior, why lizard? why?
stupid kids
Unlike a bunch of arsholes who shut down the original game servers with 800,000 users, get a clue buddy.
Hey mind if I steal your hard earned work, and use it without authorisation? You want to run a Vanilla WoW server be prepared to have it shut down. Blizzard might not even want to shut down the servers but because of the nature of IP laws if they don’t shut down a small group of fans on a Vanilla server anybody can steal their game and run it and use the fact that they didn’t shut down the Free Server so they can’t shutdown theirs.
The Warcraft IP is more valueable than ever even if you hate the game. Hollywood would love to pump out Warcraft Movies every year. That movie will reach more consumers than the game ever would. People might start playing the game again after seeing the movie. That movie is going to make a ton of money, they probably have three or four scripts for the next ones in the sequence ready to go.
Doesnt make it right and affects too many innocent people to be justified. I hope you appreciate this clue sir, as i think it is you that needs it. As well as some manners.
Put it this way:
Blizzard punish a bunch of players who want to play Vanilla WoW, so Lizard Squad punish all of WoW’s players as a result.
LS are not good guys in this scenario, or any scenario ever.
edit: Actually it’s disingenuous to imply you said that, that’s my bad
but your comment doesn’t really make sense anyway
You do recall Lizard Squad are the same guys who did a DDOS on XBL and PSN on Christmas day to spread misery? This isn’t a protest this is just spreading misery.
From what i understand Nost were going down before Blizz stepped in, they were asking their “subs” to pay for their server expenses, which could only be done in full on some French site. There was talk of cobanking, or getting a trusted frontman, but it all sounds pretty dodgy.
Source? https://forum.nostalrius.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=37403
So now it’s just a case of making Blizz the scapegoat. Doomed to fail.
Good god, a company wants to protect their Product, Pay their artists, their coders, their programmers, their RnD, their project managers, their marketers, their directors, their.. you get the idea.
You get a clue mate – take a hike.
So a bunch of script kiddies knock a single game offline for a few hours. Big whoop.
They got more than one, They took out Diablo 3, Star Craft 2, WoW, Hearthstone and anything else that needs Battle.net.
Edit: I knew I forgot one, Heroes of the Storm.
Thanks for giving them the attention they were seeking anyway, Kotaku!
Hi, are you new to Kotaku? Welcome aboard anyway!
Tweet_ Lizard Squad @LizardLands
11:15 PM – 31 Mar 2016
A global raid on lizard squad members took place today, 36 arrests. I’m the only one left. Goodbye.
So maybe now we will find out why they felt the need to attack Blizzard? Was it personal? I’m assuming they did it because they can? They had power and felt they were invincible and invisible?
Is anyone else happy that these arseholes got caught?
Great hackers, targeting a game because they aren’t good enough to affect anything that actually matters, good work guys, hope some of you can see this
Pity there wasn’t some way of tracking the little turds, because then we could ensure they never breed….snip, snip.