Blizzard servers were down today after PoodleCorp, a hacking crew, revealed it targeted the service with a DDoS attack.
Blizzard admitted the incident on Twitter, where a representative wrote, “We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting latency/connections to our games.”
The attack lasted only about an hour after PoodleCorp stopped it on its own. The crew, who have previously attacked the service at the start and end of August, promised gamers to halt the attack after one of their tweets reached 2,000 retweets.
Most gamers were willing to retweet, and Blizzard’s infrastructure came back online, allowing users to return to playing Hearthstone, Overwatch, World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, or any of Blizzard’s other popular games.
This is the fourth major DDoS attack suffered by Blizzard this year, after LizzardSquad crashed their servers in April, then PoodleCorp two times in August.
Aside from the DDoS attack, Blizzard has been having a terrible week anyway. On September 14, 17, and 18, the company suffered from technical issues that prevented users from authenticating and joining game servers.
In the meantime, PoodleCorp, a recently-created hacking group that likes to indulge in frequent DDoS attacks, has decided to shut down its rentable DDoS stresser service.
The shutdown came after its backend code leaked in August. This code was analyzed and helped security researchers and authorities track down the Internet’s biggest DDoS-for-hire service called vDos, from which PoodleCorp itself was renting the infrastructure.
