If you tried to log in, launch or otherwise access any Blizzard games through its Battle.net game client late last night, you probably didn’t have a great time. That was due to the fact that, at the time, someone thought it would be fun to target Blizzard’s servers with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
As the name suggests, a DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of internet traffic.
Blizzard took to Twitter to let its fans know something was up as well as display a message in the client. In an attempt to mitigate some of the load on its network, users that were eventually able to sign in to the client were placed in a queue that warned of longer-than-usual wait times.
It never rains but it Blizzards
Online crowd-sourced incident report aggregator DownDetector also showed that there were more than a few people facing issues with Battle.net and most of Blizzard’s properties for that hour.
The numbers are a lot lower than you’d expect for a company of this size and with the number of players across all games on the platform. So it seems the outage didn’t affect everyone. Or, just maybe, there aren’t that many people playing Blizzard games these days. We wonder why.
Don’t worry though, Blizzard says it’s all over now and you can get back to screaming at your teammates because they’re trash and you have to carry them in Overwatch. That was just a joke, no one plays that anymore.
Source: The Verge