If in the past few hours you’ve been having some difficulty playing Blizzard’s games, know that you’re not alone, and no it does not seem that Blizzard had some kind of emergency maintenance. As it turns out, it seems that Blizzard’s Battle.net servers were temporarily knocked offline due to a DDoS attack.
For those wondering who is behind the attack, it is none other than the hacking group Lizard Squad who has since come forward and claimed responsibility for it. According to their tweet, they managed to knock games like World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, StarCraft 2, and Hearthstone offline, which is pretty much Blizzard’s entire roster (no word on Heroes of the Storm though).
It is unclear as to why the Lizard Squad decided to go after Blizzard, but some have speculated that it could be due to Blizzard’s recent decision to shut down a fan-hosted server that is running the vanilla World of Warcraft. It is well within Blizzard’s right to do so since a rogue server essentially means players who aren’t paying for an actual subscription.
However many gamers have since taken issue with Blizzard’s decision, which is why the Lizard Squad’s attack makes sense as a way of retaliation. In any case last we checked, the servers appears to be back up and running like normal.