Blizzard Servers under DDOS Attack

If you've been an ongoing fan of World of Warcraft for the past decade (you're getting a slow clap and a nod from me right now), you've most likely dealt with numerous aggravating moments when the game lagged profusely. The cause of this latency is usually the result of a subpar internet provider or Blizzard providing a subpar server experience. Either way, the subsequent emotions when trying to cast and seeing the character animation, but no bar are some of the most anger-inducing.

Personally, I've been playing WoW for over ten years, and I used to experience quite a bit of lag in the early days. Now I barely see it...until today.

Now before anyone rushes to attack Blizzard for a poor server experience, remember that your internet provider could be the source of your frustration. At the moment, and according to this tweet from Blizzard, there is a massive DDOS attack aimed at a number of internet service providers, which has crippled the servers and caused thousands of players to begun experiencing a lot of lag.

This has not only affected the World of Warcraft, but if you happened to try and address the technical issue using an article from Blizzard's vast supply of support posts, you might have been greeted with this:

Which has most likely led to a new level of aggravation. That said, the forums do seem to be back up and they have a thread up for staying up-to-date.

The culprit of these DDOS attacks made on the internet service providers has yet to be revealed. Unfortunately, creating a DDOS attack is fairly easy. A blog post from the CDN provider named Cloudflare breaks it down in this post. Basically, a hacker infects a number of computers with a botnet and then uses those computers to generate a massive amount of traffic. This may be beyond the typical laymen, but as the post brings out how these hackers "rent out access to their botnets, often billing in 15 minute increments (just like lawyers)."

At this time, PoodleCorp is claiming responsibility for the attack. This is unconfirmed but they appear to be the only ones attempting too. 

At that point you only need some extra cash on hand to instigate some DDOS madness.


What do you guys think of this situation? How about awful encounters with lagging in World of Warcraft? What about in other games like Overwatch?