Blizzard‘s Battle.net service, which is responsible for powering the likes of Hearthstone, World Of Warcraft, Diablo III and Starcraft 2 went completely silent earlier today in Europe and North America, in what appeared to be some sort of freak server outage. While the service is now back up for both territories, Blizzard has released a statement on the Battle.net forums that acknowledges the outage as being the result of a DDoS attack.
It looks like we experienced a potential DDoS on one of our datacenters. Initial impact appears to have ended and our engineers put up some buffers to resolve the issue, and realms should start recovering. We’re continuing to monitor and work on mitigating the impact. Apologies for the inconvenience, and we’ll be sure to provide updates as they continue to come in.
Blizzard will undoubtedly be looking for the source of the attack, but it doesn’t look like they’re going to have to look very hard – notorious hacking group Lizard Squad have claimed responsibility for the attack on their Twitter page.
https://twitter.com/LizardLands/status/720428731727278080?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The faceless hacking group – which has previously claimed responsibility for taking down Microsoft and Sony’s Xbox Live and PlayStation Network services respectively – didn’t provide any reason for the attack, but many suspect that it could be some sort of retaliatory attack for Blizzard taking action against the owners of a private World Of Warcraft server operating against the company’s wishes.