Blizzard Shut Down by DDoS attack

Blizzard, the providers of well-known digital entertainment venues such as World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, Hearthstone, Starcraft 2 (and its two expansions), and of course, Tracer & Friends (otherwise known as Overwatch), recently found itself shaken a bit--as last night, players found themselves unable to connect to Blizzard's servers to enjoy the largely online-exclusive titles.

The reason? I'll let Glaxigrav, their support forum agent, explain:

It looks like we experienced a potential DDoS on one of our datacenters. Initial impact appears to have ended and our engineers put up some buffers to resolve the issue, and realms should start recovering. We're continuing to monitor and work on mitigating the impact. Apologies for the inconvenience, and we'll be sure to provide updates as they continue to come in.

A good ol' fashioned DDoS attack. In fact, they were attacked a few times yesterday before they seemed to finally get a handle on things, but even this morning people have been complaining that logging in has been difficult. So, if you were looking forward to playing some good ol' fashioned World of Warcraft, well... tamper your expectations, apparently things are fixed, but DDoS attacks tend to come in waves, so, it could only be a matter of time before the next one.

That said, if you were worried about your data being compromised--don't. That's not really what a DDoS attack is. As Glaxigrav explains:

These attacks are just flooding our internet tubes: no actual account information, payment information, or character data is at risk. Given some of the realm stability issues caused by the service interruptions there may be some log loss when loot is dropped, or crafting occurs. Our Game Masters will do our very best to locate any missing items if a ticket is submitted.

So the biggest risk will really be for Hardcore players of Diablo 3, who may have lost their characters forever due to this mess, but other than what could be countless hours of one's life vanishing in the blink of an eye, no serious damage will be done.

That said, the timing of this DDoS attack certainly is curious, as some players have pointed out--given that Blizzard just shut down the fan-favorite vanilla server... but then, that could be--and probably is, honestly--idle speculation.

Still. The timing is strange.