DDoS cyberattack hits Battle.net: Overwatch, Hearthstone, and World of Warcraft are down

Update: Battle.net is working again, according to Blizzard.

Justice isn’t raining from the sky for once, and it’s not because I shot Pharah with Ana’s sleeper dart.

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Blizzard’s Battle.net servers are experiencing issues once again that are keeping players offline. This is the third time Battle.net has gone offline this week, but this time, the publisher has revealed the situation is a result of a distributed denial-of-service cyberattack (DDoS). This is affecting Overwatch, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, and more. Players on PC as well as consoles like Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are all encountering difficulties, and those gamers have taken to social media to let Blizzard know.

On Twitter, the publisher has updated its official customer-service account to confirm the problem:

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We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting latency/connections to our games.

— Blizzard CS – The Americas (@BlizzardCS) September 18, 2016

While the problems on September 13 and September 16 were with Battle.net’s authentication servers, this DDoS barrage is an assault on the services that run the networks for the company’s games. A group called Poodle Corp is taking credit for today’s attack. This is a splinter organization of the cyberattack group LizardSquad that has blasted the servers for Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, and Battle.net repeatedly over the last few years.

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Blizzard (NA) #Offline #PoodleCorp

— PoodleCorp (@PoodleCorp) September 18, 2016

Today’s outage comes just three weeks after Blizzard launched the latest expansion for World of Warcraft. The company now has more games running on more platforms than ever before. Between WOW and Starcraft II on PC, Hearthstone on PC and mobile, and Overwatch and Diablo III on PC and consoles, this outage is likely affecting a huge amount of players.

Originally posted on September 13.

Updated on September 16 and 19.

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