As of right now Blizzard Entertainment appears to be under a DDOS attack by Lizard Squad, a group of hackers who have successfully taken down a multitude of other large 'targets' before.

Players first noticed that something was wrong an hour or so ago, complaining of problems with latency and disconnections in a now stickied thread on the World of Warcraft forums.

Glaxigraw, a Support Forum Agent for Blizzard, stated that they were experiencing a “potential DDOS on one of our datacenters.”

BlizzardCS confirmed this, stating that it was “a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting connections to our games,” which is an interesting way to describe it.

This soon escalated when Lizard Squad claimed responsibility for the DDOS in a tweet, stating that all of their games connected to Battle.Net were offline. Coincidentally, Lizard Squad advertised their ‘services’ a few days earlier that promise ‘100% uptime’.

[embed]https://twitter.com/LizardLands/status/720433791823691776[/embed]

Soon after it was revealed that Lizard Squad had hacked into Blizzard’s servers at least five hours ago, posting pictures of their private contact lists and emails.

Lizard Squad has promised that there is ‘more to come’, which sounds somewhat ominous. With all of Blizzard’s games offline, one has to wonder at what else Lizard Squad could do next, or what Blizzard’s reaction to this mess will be.

[embed]https://twitter.com/LizardLands/status/720445390877769728[/embed]

As of a few minutes ago, Support Forum Agent Glaxigrav asked players to test World of Warcraft to see how it played, with players stating that it was mostly fine. Slightly later Glaxigrav stated that the main target of the attack was World of Warcraft, which seems to give support to a certain theory.

Quick Take:

Could this attack be the result of the recent shutdown of Nostalrius? As of right now there is a petition of nearly 100 thousand players asking Blizzard to reconsider their stance on hosting legacy servers, but as of right now there has been no response. While a DDOS is obviously not a legal way of getting Blizzard’s attention, it certainly will get their attention. The timing seems pretty suspicious, but one way or another, it looks as though we find soon find out.

What are your thoughts on these events? Do you think Blizzard should have done more?