Hacking group Lizard Squad are taking credit for forcing a number of Blizzard’s servers offline, with World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3 and Hearthstone all suffering as a result of an apparent DDoS attack.
With many users across Blizzard’s library of games complaining about disconnection and latency issues, a member of the publisher’s support team responded to these issues on the World of Warcraft forum, writing: “It looks like we experienced a potential DDoS on one of our datacenters. The 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.”
Lizard Squad swiftly took responsibility for the outages, posting the following tweets:
US Blizzard #Offline – WoW #Offline, Diablo 3 #Offline, Starcraft 2 #Offline, Hearthstone #Offline @fbiarelosers @AppleJ4ckxoxo
— Lizard Squad (@LizardLands) April 14, 2016
EU Blizzard #Offline – WoW #Offline, Diablo 3 #Offline, Starcraft 2 #Offline, Hearthstone #Offline @fbiarelosers @AppleJ4ckxoxo
— Lizard Squad (@LizardLands) April 14, 2016
Arrest us.
— Lizard Squad (@LizardLands) April 14, 2016
Eventually, the servers were brought back online by Blizzard, though Lizard Squad has said that there will be “more to come.” It is unsure why the group decided to target Blizzard, though many have speculated that the DDoS attack was retaliation for the publisher shutting down Nostalrius, a fan-run, not-for-profit server which allowed WoW fans to play the long obsolete vanilla version of the MMORPG.
