Blizzard's World of Warcraft and other games taken offline by Lizard squad's DDoS attack

Blizzard was hit by a massive DDoS attack on 13 April, with gamers complaining of being unable to log into their games like World Of Warcraft, Diablo 3 and more. Hacker group Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for the cyberattack.

Lizard Squad's attack shut down all of Blizzard's servers as well as some of its most popular games. The hacker group posted a tweet boasting of all the games that their cyberattack effectively took offline, which included games like Starcraft 2, World Of Warcraft and Hearthstone. The hacker group claimed to have shut down the games for both US and UK Blizzard servers.

Blizzard tweeted confirming that their servers had been hit by a DDoS attack and two hours later tweeted again confirming that the issue had been resolved. A Blizzard support forum official also confirmed the attack soon after users complained about slow or no logins and assured its users that user account and payment information had not been affected, especially since DDoS attacks are not quite the same as a hack.

The Blizzard forum post said: "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."

Why did Lizard Squad target Blizzard? Some are theorising that the DDoS attack may be in retaliation against Blizzard's decision to shut down the popular World Of Warcraft fan-run Nostalrius server. Gamers took to reddit to vent their anger and frustration at the server being shut down, which at the time of closing had around 800,000 registered users.

Blizzard has confirmed that the service disruption caused by the DDoS attack has been resolved and that users should be able to log in without any further issues. However, in their latest tweet posted at 7.55pm on 13 April the Lizard Squad seemed to have signed off with a threat of "more to come".