Posted on 10/04/2022 8:39:10 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Overwatch 2's launch on Tuesday has so far been less of a launch and more of a line: thousands of players, including a few at PC Gamer, have been stuck in a lengthy login queue(opens in new tab), only to run into a connection error after making it to the menu. Blizzard president Mike Ybarra tweeted(opens in new tab) this afternoon that this isn't just the result of too many players trying to get in—Overwatch 2 is currently suffering a DDoS attack.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks direct large amounts of internet traffic to specific servers, overwhelming them with more connections than they can keep up with. Cloudflare simplifies a DDoS attack as "an unexpected traffic jam clogging up the highway, preventing regular traffic from arriving at its destination." Cloudflare has an approachable breakdown(opens in new tab) of how hackers create botnets and use them to carry out DDoS attacks if you're after a deeper understanding of how they work.
This isn't Blizzard's first DDoS rodeo: we've reported on DDoS issues affecting Battle.net and World of Warcraft in 2020(opens in new tab), 2019(opens in new tab), and years prior. A DDoS attacker who targeted WoW in 2010 even got jail time(opens in new tab) for knocking the MMO offline.
(Excerpt) Read more at pcgamer.com ...
So Fortnite meets Valorant? Mehhh... Why would anyone DDOS this? I’ll stick to War Thunder and Post Scriptum. You game?
MMOs are beyond my ability to keep up. Mostly play a handful of old single player no-brainer games. Building things and helping the NPCs appeals to me the most.
Age of Empires?
PC gamers?
Millennials everywhere distraught with anxiety?
People are still playing Overwatch? Wow, really?
FreeCell. I’m a wild man.
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