Blizzard spent the past weekend fending off a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that made Diablo IV unplayable for hours.
This past weekend was a struggle for Blizzard and its Diablo IV fans who wanted to play the game. Players reported login problems for the role-playing game, along with other Battle.net games, from Saturday night into Sunday morning. Blizzard’s Twitter account explained that the problem was caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which they were “actively working to mitigate”.
DDoS attacks typically overload a server’s IP with traffic perpetrated by cyberattackers/hackers. In the worst-case scenario, the hackers would also send some sort of ransom demand to stop, but this was not the case.
On Sunday evening, the DDoS attack was declared over by Blizzard on Twitter. The message did not specifically explain whether the attack had been fully mitigated but could have been resolved by the people behind the attack simply stopping or a combination of both.
Diablo IV fans were quick to respond across social media and online forums to the game’s outage almost immediately after the issues were prolonged. Redditor LethalBacon wrote, “Over 12 hours for me. Was hoping to play a few hours on a Saturday night after working ~10 hours. Nope. No worries, it’ll be up Sunday morning! Nope. S**t happens, but it’s frustrating.”
DDoS attacks have been around for a long time, especially in the online gaming community. Many CS: Go and League of Legends have sometimes mentioned being DDoS-ed in-game. But for this popular RPG game, it has begged the question of why there has not been an offline mode implemented for it.
This was not the first time that the game was unplayable since its launch earlier in June. Many disconnection problems and other issues have led to some avid Hardcore characters being accidentally perma-killed as they approach or hit the level cap of 100 due to a lost connection and another bug.
While many have voiced their opinions on making a Diablo IV single player mode, Blizzard defended the online interactions before. They noted how fans liked the MMO elements of PvP combat, shared social spaces, party-based dungeon-crawling, and occasional unplanned interactions between players.
