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WoW: Legion, Battlefield 1 beta suffer launch-day outages

Blizzard confirms DDoS attack; hacker collective claims it DDoSed EA.

WoW: Legion, Battlefield 1 beta suffer launch-day outages

Two of the gaming world's biggest properties battled major outages on Wednesday, as Blizzard's World of Warcraft was slammed by a distributed denial of service attack, while EA's Battlefield 1 also suffered a suspected DDoS thrashing.

Players hoping to take part in the online-only beta of EA's forthcoming World War I shooter Battlefield 1 were left frustrated for most of the day after the servers went down, preventing people from logging in. Blizzard, meanwhile, experienced difficulties of its own, confirming that it was being targeted by a sustained DDoS attack seemingly timed to coincide with the release of Legion, the World of Warcraft expansion.

It is unclear, however, whether the two attacks are linked.

EA said it had managed to get everything back up and running early on Thursday morning, after players were locked out for nearly 24 hours—mainly from the Battlefield servers, though other EA gamers also reported outages.

The Battlefield 1 beta is time-limited as developer DICE stress-tests the servers. EA has yet to confirm the nature of the attack and wasn’t immediately available for comment at time of publication. It said:

A group styling itself PoodleCorp on Twitter claimed responsibility for the attack, though its supposed involvement hasn't been independently confirmed.

PoodleCorp claims that it has previously launched similar attacks on Grand Theft Auto servers, as well as Blizzard's Battle.net at the start of August and the Pokémon Go servers back in July.

The Blizzard attack began less than 24 hours after the release of World of Warcraft: Legion, the sixth expansion to its long-running MMO. The outage hit European servers first before spreading worldwide. Blizzard admitted on Twitter that the issue, which affected other games including the popular FPS Overwatch, was caused by a DDoS attack. It seems to have been largely resolved for now, though it's unclear who was behind it.

We are currently monitoring a DDOS attack against network providers which is affecting latency/connections to our games. #BlizzCS

Channel Ars Technica