Indie storefront Itch.io was taken offline for several hours earlier today owing to what the site's owner describes as a "bogus phishing report" for a fanmade page based on the Funko toy property.
In a message on social media platform X, Itch.io says its site was "taken down by Funko" due to "trash 'AI Powered' brand protection software called BrandShield", which flagged a page on the site as fraud, leading to domain registrar IWantMyName to "ignore" Itch.io's response, "just disabl[ing] the domain".
Over on YCombinator's Hacker News portal, Itch.io owner Leaf Corcoran provides some additional context. He says that someone "made a fan page" for Funko video game Funko Fusion, and that page contained "links to the official site and screenshots of the game".
Corcoran speculates that the aforementioned BrandShield software is "probably instructed to eradicate all 'unauthorized' use of [Funko's] trademark", and so the software sent phishing and fraud reports to Itch.io's domain registrar.
He goes on to say that he first received reports of the alerts from IWantMyName and host Linode "about 5 or 6 days ago", and that he had removed the offending page and disabled the associated account. The matter was settled with Linode fairly swiftly, while IWantMyName "never responded" to Corcoran's actions.
The Itch.io site owner says he's "assuming no-one on [IWantMyName's] end 'closed' the ticket, so it went into an automatic system to disable the domain after some number of days".
The whole debacle rather sounds like a series of automated systems being set off for circumstances they should probably never even have raised an eyebrow at, but at any rate, Itch.io is now back up, so there's that, at least.
Naturally, several developers and industry figures have responded to Itch.io's outage with disappointment at Funko and BrandShield, which isn't hard to understand given that the outage meant many indie devs couldn't sell their products for a number of hours.
Given that Itch.io routinely raises quite a lot of money for charity - as well as developers themselves - with its bundles and fundraising efforts, it's probably in Funko and BrandShield's best interests to make sure this doesn't happen again, assuming they are the ones at fault.
