A recent and massive DDOS attack aimed at a number of internet service providers caused severe latency issues and problems connecting to Blizzard’s games through Battle.net.
The recent attack has affected all of the games that are accessed through Battle.net, including World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Hearthstone. Everything now seems to be up and running again, with Blizzard even making a thread to help keep everyone informed about the attack.
Hacker group PoodleCorp are claiming responsibility for the attack. They also recently claimed to have launched an attack Pokemon GO’s servers.
(EU & US) Blizzard #Offline #PoodleCorp @BlizzardCS @PoodlesInBlack @Gh0stPoodle
— PoodleCorp (@PoodleCorp) August 3, 2016
Unfortunately, launching a DDOS attack can be easy. A blog post from the CDN provider named Cloudflare explains how to do it, and how they deal with such attacks.
The attack comes just after Blizzard released a huge update for Overwatch in order to celebrate the Olympic Games. The Summer Games started on August 1st, and will run until August 22nd. The event includes Olympics-themed Loot Boxes and a special Brawl event called Lúcioball, a soccer-like game that features Overwatch’s DJ-Hero. Prizes include national and athletic cosmetics, with plenty to collect for each character. Once a player unlocks an item, it is theirs to keep. However, once the event ends, all of these items are going back to the vault.