If you had trouble signing into online games like PlanetSide 2 or H1Z1 over the past day or two, you can blame whoever’s going after their servers.


For the past couple of days, the studio Daybreak (formerly called SOE) has been getting hit by Distributed Denial of Service attacks that have rendered games like PlanetSide unplayable. They’re in the clear now, they say, but it was a rough past few hours.

As is typical in the murky world of internet sabotage, it’s unclear exactly who’s responsible for these attacks, but this outage followed some high-profile comments by Daybreak CEO John Smedley about Julius Kivimaki, a Finnish teenager who was recently convicted on various charges of computer fraud. Smedley threatened to sue Kivimaki and his parents—”I’m coming for you Julius,” he wrote after news of Kivimaki’s conviction came out.


Finland charged Kivimaki, who has connections to a group of internet troublemakers called Lizard Squad, with a two-year suspended sentence that involves no jail time. The charges involve computer fraud and security breaches but are unrelated to the high-profile attacks that brought down both Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network last Christmas. Lizard Squad took responsibility for those outages.

Smedley also has some history with Lizard Squad—in August of 2014, members of the group called a bomb threat into a plane the CEO was on, leading American Airlines to divert the flight for security reasons. Smedley pins the blame for this incident on Kivimaki.

“I’m extremely angry that the Finnish justice system chose to let Julius Kivimaki off with a 2 year suspended sentence,” Smedley wrote on Reddit yesterday. “This guy is the worst kind of bad news. He’s been involved for years in every kind of terrible thing you can imagine including Carding, hacking, swatting people all over the world. He’s also participated in a major way in DDOS attacks that caused a lot of grief for gamers and a lot of economic damage to the companies that make and run games.”

You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.