Blizzard's Battle.net Servers Knocked Offline By Another DDoS Attack

Blizzard Entertainment became a victim of yet another distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack as its Battle.net servers were knocked down on Sunday, Sept. 18.

The DDoS attack that rendered Battle.net's servers offline was waged by hacking group PoodleCorp.

Owing to the attack, Battle.net, which runs several popular games such as World of Warcraft, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft and Overwatch to name a few, was left handicapped even as angry users took to social media to vent their ire.

Gamers on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were all affected by the outage. Blizzard Entertainment acknowledged the situation on its official Twitter account.

"We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting latency/connections to our games," wrote Blizzard in a tweet.

The DDoS attack on Battle.net lasted for half an hour after PoodleCorp took to Twitter to state that it would halt the attack and restore the servers if the tweet below was retweeted 2,000 times.

The blackmail (ransom note?) found favor with a majority of gamers as they were only too willing to retweet to have access again to the games they were playing. As promised, PoodleCorp stopped the attack once the 2,000 retweet milestone was reached. This is not the first time Blizzard Entertainment has come under the mercy of PoodleCorp.

Earlier in August, we reported that it was hit with a PoodleCorp DDoS attack, which disrupted gameplay for users of Battle.net until network engineers addressed the issue. Back then however, the hacking group did not ask for retweets.

Blizzard Entertainment has been the victim of a spate of DDoS attacks in the past few months. In June, an attack took down its servers as well. The outage was attributed to Lizard Squad member AppleJ4ck, who claimed responsibility and cautioned that the hack was a small part of some "preparations."

Aside from the DDoS attack, Blizzard has been having a terrible week anyway. On Sept. 14, 16 and 18, the company suffered from technical issues that prevented or delayed users from logging in and joining the game servers. However, for now, Blizzard Entertainment can breathe easy as the technical problems Battle.net was encountering owing to the DDoS attack from PoodleCorp have been resolved.

Photo: Davide Restivo | Flickr