Online gaming service brought down overnight by hackers, while EA gaming service is sporadically offline as gamers vie for win

The digital gaming service Steam was down for over an hour on Friday after being targeted for a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

Two Twitter users, @chFtheCat and @LARCENY_, have taken credit for the hacks, and also for a similar attack on Battle.net, the login system used by World of Warcraft and other games produced by Blizzard.

The attack was apparently unrelated to a parallel set of attacks, co-ordinated by a group calling itself DerpTrolling, against EA's Origin online gaming service. Origin was sporidically offline for a period of almost 24 hours.

DerpTrolling had previously brought down the servers for Dota 2 and League of Legends, two popular "multiplayer online battle arena games". Those actions sparked criticism of popular Twitch streamer James Varga, who was accused of egging on the hackers.

DDOS attacks use thousands of infected PCs, known as "bots", to send brief messages that overwhelm the servers of its target. Steam's store and community features have been responding slowly or not at all throughout the night.

Varga, whose videos of League of Legends matches attract hundreds of thousands of views, egged on the DDoS attackers, telling them to take the servers down if his team started to lose.

None of the attackers have yet spoken of motivations for the attack, but all seem to be doing so for little more than their own amusement.