Some gamers attempting to play several popular Blizzard titles found themselves encountering unexpected errors last night as the developer and publisher’s Battle.net service became the target of a DDOS attack that led to widespread disruptions. The attack led to sign-in problems and low latency for players in a variety of Blizzard games, including its massively successful MMO World of Warcraft and the fast-paced free-to-play shooter Overwatch 2.Launched in 1996 just days before the release of the original Diablo, Blizzard’s Battle.net service is a one-stop-shop for gamers looking to explore and play the developer and publisher’s vast catalog of games. The PC client serves as a mashup of a launcher, storefront, and social service, with the Battle.net app working as a hub for launching the majority of Blizzard’s games, while Battle.net servers host the developer’s games on both PC and consoles. While many Blizzard-developed titles like Overwatch 2 require users to have a Battle.net account even when playing on consoles, there is no Battle.net requirement for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - though players are still required to have an Activision ID.Players began reporting problems with online functionality in many of Blizzard’s games last evening, leading the Twitter account for Blizzard Entertainment’s North American customer support to begin posting troubleshooting solutions for affected players. Disruptions included disconnections when signing in to World of Warcraft and Overwatch 2, as well as high latency and slow log-in times overall across the service. Blizzard support eventually identified the issue as being caused by a DDOS attack and stated that it was “actively working to mitigate this issue.” A follow-up posted a few hours later stated that the attacks had ended, advising players to attempt logging into their games again.
While Blizzard’s consolidation of its online services under Battle.net makes it easy to quickly team up with friends online, having all its games running on the same backend can also lead to headaches for players when everything doesn’t work as intended. Unfortunately, Battle.net outages and disruptions aren’t an entirely uncommon occurrence, and can leave players feeling frustrated when they can’t sign in to their favorite games. Over 12 hours after Blizzard’s customer support team tweeted that this latest issue had been resolved some players were still reporting problems, with one affected user imploring the developer to “Please fix, would like to play diablo, thanks” after hours of encountering errors.
Although this round of service problems with Battle.net appears to be resolved for most users at this point, the fact that a single DDOS attack could cause problems across so many titles illustrates the drawbacks of keeping Blizzard’s online services all in one place. Now that the company has managed to fend off attacks from hackers it should have time to focus on other pressing matters, like the new US Department of Justice lawsuit against Activision Blizzard.