Blizzard faces DDoS attack during coronavirus pandemic

Now that many of us are stuck at home as we practice social distancing, many turn to video games as a way to pass the time. This implies a certain amount of dependency upon the network services maintained by game developers like Blizzard. Games like Overwatch, League of Legends, Fortnite, and so on are all dependent upon the game developer’s ability to maintain a network capable of handling the myriad games formed by folks playing each day. So when one network goes under attack, this impacts countless players.

Blizzard has a target on its side

Blizzard is one studio that attracts countless thousands of players to its numerous games each day. So that makes the studio something of a target for hacking groups looking to pass the time. Under prolonged assault from hackers, this sometimes cripples players’ ability to log into their favorite games for extended periods of time. But Blizzard didn’t take last night’s attack sitting down. No, they fought back and made quick work of the DDoS attack.

At approximately 10:15pm CST, Blizzard’s customer service Twitter account informed the public that the company was monitoring a DDoS attack against its network providers. As a result of this, players were likely to experience latency and disconnections. Folks who’ve endured DDoS attacks before on their favorite games have learned to expect such attacks to last upwards of several hours. But Blizzard posted again in just under an hour to state that the attack’s monitoring had ended at 10:56pm CST.

History repeats itself

This isn’t the first time that a DDoS has impacted Blizzard’s servers. Last year, numerous World of Warcraft Classic realms were targetted by a DDoS attack that kept players from getting online for a lengthy period of time. This came less than a month after Classic servers were released.

No more than a week after the incident, Blizzard happily announced that authorities had found and apprehended the instigator of the attacks. Nothing is official yet on the search for last night’s attacker. Maybe they aren’t even taking an active interest in finding this person due to how short the attack lasted.

Time will tell.

Ryan Goodrich

Ryan has been writing since long before he could even write. He's written resumes, software user guides, consumer electronic reviews, and myriad web content spanning a variety of industries. But now he's writing about video games, which is much more interesting.

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