Blizzard servers are experiencing a DDoS attack causing login failures and lengthy queues for players on the company’s Battle.net service, says the Call of Duty publisher. Blizzard says it is actively monitoring the ongoing ‘distributed denial-of-service’ attack, which is leaving users unable to log in or causing them to be placed in long queues for Activision Blizzard games including World of Warcraft, Call of Duty and CoD Warzone, Hearthstone, Overwatch, and Diablo.
Outage reporting website Down Detector saw a spike in reports for Blizzard’s Battle.net service around 12am PT / 3am ET / 8am BST on September 14. The Blizzard customer support Twitter account noted soon after that the company is “investigating an issue affecting our authentication servers, which may result in failed or slow login attempts.”
Some users report that upon trying to log into Battle.net they are being put into queues with estimated wait times of over an hour. A DDoS, or distributed denial-of-service, attack is a malicious disruption of an online service where bots intentionally flood the targeted server with traffic from a wide range of sources. This results in the server being able to address legitimate connections, and in some cases can cause outages altogether.
Blizzard customer support follows up by saying, “We continue to actively monitor an ongoing DDoS attack which is affecting latency/connections to our games.” DDoS attacks are notorious because the wide number of sources sending requests to the server can often be difficult to pin down and block.
Update – 12:52pm September 14: Blizzard says that the DDoS attacks have now ended. For further updates on this issue, you can check BlizzardCS on Twitter.
Outside of this issue, Blizzard is currently in the process of temporarily shutting some of the largest World of Warcraft Classic servers to prevent queues from overpopulation. Meanwhile, a Warzone 2 reveal is set for Call of Duty Next, while recent changes to the Hearthstone battle pass have left some players upset with perceived “pay-to-win” changes. While you’re waiting for Blizzard’s servers to return to normal service, why not check out the best free PC games for something else to keep you occupied?