A DDoS attack on Blizzard Entertainment's Battle.net service causes many of the company's servers to be crippled, with players no longer able to play online.

On April 13, Blizzard Entertainment's Battle.net service was victim of a DDoS attack, impacting online functions for all of the company's major titles. This meant that fans of such games as World of Warcraft, StarCraft 2, Hearthstone, and Diablo 3 were unable to connect to servers, until Blizzard could resolve the issues.

On the World of Warcraft forums, a support representative confirmed that the servers had been victim of a DDoS attack, but that Blizzard's engineers had been working to resolve the problems.

"We're continuing to monitor and work on mitigating the impact," wrote support forum agent, Glaxigrav. "Apologies for the inconvenience, and we'll be sure to provide updates as they continue to come in."

From the most recent updates, it looks as though services have slowly been restored, allowing players to once again log on to the Battle.net services. The hacker group Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for the attack. Lizard Squad have taken credit for several past DDoS occurences, including last year's Christmas network outages.

Some fans have theorised that the attack was due to the shutting down of the recent vanilla World of Warcraft server Nostalrius, though this hasn't been confirmed by the hacker team. A petition to get Blizzard to allow fan-hosted legacy servers is attracting a lot of attention, with almost 100,000 signatures totalled so far.

This is a bad time for Blizzard to be on the recieving end of a DDoS attack, especially as the company prepares for its Overwatch beta testing weekend which is kicking off on Friday, April 15. This test is said to be especially draining on a user's computer to allow for better technical feedback, suggesting that even the slightest connection issues could affect how well the game runs.

The beta is in preparation for Overwatch's launch on May 24, though an open beta will be in full operation from May 5 through May 9. People who have pre-ordered the game will get early access to the beta on May 3. As part of the game's run up to launch, Blizzard has released a new animated short titled 'Alive'. The company reportedly plans on releasing more shorts before the release of the full game, allowing players to become acquainted with the title's varied cast.

Although the DDoS left Blizzard's servers crippled momentarily, users shouldn't still be experiencing problems at this point in time. Were you affected by this down time? Leave us a comment and let us know.