Blizzard confirms World of Warcraft target of DDoS attack [UPDATED]
Update 5:50 a.m. PST:
The servers are now down for maintenance, and the attack is over. If further ones happen, we'll announce accordingly.
Update 8:15 p.m. PST
The DDoS attacks continue. Blizzard is rolling out updates to the backend services at a breakneck pace right now, some of which are having unintended consequences and further complicating an already messy situation. However, it should be noted that this is to be expected when combating such a large scale attack. In no way is Blizzard responsible for the server outages on this scale -- responsibility rests with the script kiddies and bot net controllers.
It's hard to know just how big this attack is, but with the sustained issues it's causing, and the severity of response from Blizzard, it's safe to assume that it's big. Battle.net is a hardened internet service that has withstood onslaughts like this before. For it to fail at such a critical juncture is nothing but catastrophic for the short term, and could have serious long term implications. We have some idea, shown above, of just how global this attack is.
We'll update this post as the night continues, providing you with the latest. In the mean time -- we recommend you catch up on your lore, and not concern yourself with logging in.
Blizzard also issued the following updated statement at 8:00 pm PST this evening:
Updated by Adam Holisky. Original post follows after the break.
Original Post:
WoW Insider received reports earlier today that Blizzard may be the target of a significant DDoS effort -- and community manager Bashiok has confirmed it on the World of Warcraft forums.
Europe was our first region to launch, and we encountered a few issues due to the sheer number of players attempting to enter Draenor from a single location. We worked to add multiple new ways to access Draenor, and this helped ease some of the initial rush into the new expansion as players were able to access it from their capital cities, as well as from the shrines in Pandaria.
While that solution helped a ton for our North American launch, we ran into a few other issues, including a distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in increased latency.
Bashiok goes on to outline additional issues Blizzard is currently attempting to resolve: instance servers timing out, disconnects from the continent servers, and performance and phasing issues with garrisons.
