Here’s Why ‘Overwatch,’ ‘World Of Warcraft’ And More Blizzard Games Were Down On Sunday

Blizzard Entertainment’s Battle.net servers were slapped with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Sunday, preventing players from accessing their favorite games like “Overwatch,” “World of Warcraft” and “Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft,” among others.

According to VentureBeat, the cyberattack knocked off Battle.net servers and kept players offline for some time. The site also reported that players took to social media to share that they were experiencing difficulties in accessing the games they were playing.

Blizzard took to Twitter to confirm that a DDoS attack was preventing their network providers from functioning well. The publisher wrote: “We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting latency/connections to our games.”

VentureBeat also pointed out that the Sept. 18 incident was the third time that Blizzard’s servers went down in a week. However, the first two incidents — reportedly took place on Sept. 13 and Sept. 16 — were problems with authentication servers, while the latest one was an assault on the company’s networks.

While the Battle.net servers were offline on Sunday, a splinter organization of notorious hackers group Lizard Squad called Poodle Corp reportedly claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack. ZDNet even learned that Poodle Corp tweeted that it would only end the attack if its tweet get 2,000 retweets.

Fortunately, gamers were up to speed in retweeting, so just less than an hour since the servers went down, Poodle Corp confirmed that it has freed Blizzard’s servers.

Blizzard has yet to post a follow-up tweet about Poodle Corp’s DDoS attack, but gamers are flooding its initial tweet with complaints on how its servers have gone offline for three times in just a week.

Blizzard Entertainment is reportedly a frequent subject of cyberattacks, with ZDNet pointing out that the publisher’s servers were also hit by an attack in late August and that its system has been subject to password hacks before.