If you wanted to watch other people play games, you may run into some issues.
Twitch is down for many people right now. The company has confirmed the issue, and it says it is working to address the problem. Connectivity problems are preventing many people from logging in to stream or to interact with currently active channels. Other errors are preventing Twitch from loading at all. While possibly unrelated, a cyberattacker named Spaso on Twitter is taking credit for the outage. Twitch, which makes a significant portion of its revenue from advertising, stands to lose some of that income when people cannot watch or stream.
We’ve contacted Twitch for a comment, which reiterated what it is saying on Twitter
Our engineers are continuing to work on video delivery, and hope to have it fixed as soon as possible. ^AC
— Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) March 18, 2015
Twitch is a massive video site. It has more than 65 million monthly active viewers and more than 1 million unique broadcasters. It is accustomed to handling an immense load traffic. But a target distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) could still overload certain servers in the chain that keep the site running.
Spaso claims he targeted the “Twitch streaming gateway,” but it’s possible that he is just blustering.
https://twitter.com/GrepSpaso/status/578241156498243584
These issues have forced dozens of people to cancel their streaming plans for the evening:
Stream cancelled since twitch is broken tonight. No streamers can stream! Crazy, hope they fix it.
— Like (@_nikolaiegorov) March 18, 2015
Apologies to everyone who was going to watch my stream tonight – Twitch has been down for over an hour now, and so no one can stream atm.
— Milly (@JordanMilly_1) March 18, 2015
Something to do with Twitch is messed up no stream tonight
— alex (@alexwghall) March 18, 2015
Cyberattacks are turning into a common threat for gaming companies. Yesterday, publisher Electronic Arts confirmed that a DDoS barrage temporarily took down the Battlefield: Hardline servers on Xbox One.
This also comes a few months after a group known as Lizard Squad took credit for hitting Xbox Live and PlayStation Network with a massive DDoS attack on Christmas. It was so effective that it knocked Sony’s gaming service offline for more than five days.
Often these attacks do not originate from skilled hackers looking to steal information. They are often the result of moderately skilled computer users implementing software that can call on a number of computers to perform actions. So while your favorite stream is potentially not working tonight, your credit-card information is probably safe.