Players have been experiencing login issues with Blizzard games this afteroon and Blizzard has confirmed they are victims of a DDoS attack.

Diablo, World of Warcraft, StarCraft and Hearthstone players may be impacted by high latency and disconnections during their gaming experience that are the result of a series of DDoS attacks on certain European online services. Although Blizzard’s infrastructure isn’t targeted, the disruption effects rippled and have been felt by a portion of our players’ population. While we are closely monitoring the situation we wanted to thank you for your patience and apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

We have been able to login periodically this afternoon but it’s been up and down. Investigations are continuing but some Blizzard services are still being affected. Live updates are being posted on their Twitter account so if you experience any problems keep an eye on that.

The problem surfaced yesterday so it’s an on-going issue and players will just have to persevere when trying to login.

Ashley Stephenson, CEO of Corero Network had this to say on these Blizzard outages:

“While it appears that Blizzard may not be the direct target of these most recent attacks they are reporting to be suffering from collateral damage. This is a common side effect of larger scale DDoS attacks. The shared infrastructure of the Internet, Service Provider or Hosting center are all subject to possible overload when they are forced to carry the malicious attack traffic and this can impact innocent bystanders such as other customers who are downstream of the overloaded resources even though their online services are not explicitly being targeted by the attack traffic. Think of it as an attempt to create an intentional “rush hour” where all commuters suffer. To combat this issue the intermediate providers also need to deploy First Line of Defense DDoS protection services to prevent the traffic jam from occurring in the first place.”