Trying to grab a few min, but battle.net is telling me there’s an active DDOS attack and estimates login at 7 min.
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate Blizzard just being honest about this - I’ll just come back later.
When I worked at a different gaming studio it was our policy not to say what was happening, which basically meant players blamed us for login/latency/etc problems during a DDOS. This was a super bad experience for staff/devs/ops.
As someone who works to mitigate DDoS attacks on a regular basis in my daily job, i was surprised to see the transparency but appreciate it.
As someone who thinks that DDoS stands for Direct Denial of Snacktime, what is it about the nature of this attack that you would NOT want to say anything? Just curious if there’s a technical reason ^^;
Only from my experience, it is from a PR standpoint to maintain a healthy image of the Brand and data security. Not everyone understands what a DDoS is, so people jump to conclusions or form misinterpretations that can negatively impact the brand if people start ranting on social media about the attack with misinformation. Also, you want to maintain a sense of control to your investors and consumers - inside and outside of the diablo community. So often, it is best to just say “We are experiencing connectivity issues” rather than the real reason “We are getting attacked by a crapton of bots and our CDN infrastructure is having a tough time handling the requests”.
my snacktime was definitely not interrupted
I haven’t eaten enough today, I think the DDoS is affecting me ;_;
A denial-of-service attack or DDos attack is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator(s) seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. It works by utilizing multiple compromised computer systems as sources of attack traffic.
We used to get them in D3 and they always announced it as a DDoS attack.
That’s fair. I think a lot of people do understand that it’s kind of just the equivalent of getting spammed so much with fake customers that you can’t serve the real ones, but it makes sense that it might not be well understood like that so they don’t want people to get images of stuff like data breaches in their heads.
That’s kind of unusual for me coming from an industry where you usually take a lot of care to explain what / why something can’t happen when it should, but when applied to this, thinking about it, it makes sense.
Thanks!
Mills gave a great answer. Will add… in our case it got personal… like “we will find and crash your plane” personal (and went on for years) after the then CEO was (by some people’s opinion) too public/aggressive about it. This led to a pendulum swing in the other direction (say/acknowledge nothing).
A decent recap of the early innings (got worse from here):
siliconangle.com/2015/07/10/lizard-squad-throws-ddos-tantrum-over-taunts-from-ceo-of-daybreak-games/
Great explanation, thank you!
I wonder who/why they would do this though… against a company like Blizzard (I mean I’m sure they have their reasons)- But Blizzard is a huge… multi million (billion?) dollar company…
The Sheer Nerve!
I thought it meant. You are experiencing a Diablo denial of service
I’ve taken a break from this season so I’m okay, but it does suck when people want to stomp their feet and DDoS a video game… Mostly it just hurts the other gamers.
I think most of the times its just malicious fun. People in these botting communities receive enjoyment out of knowing they took down XYZ website or service.
I just got in. The attack is still underway so If you play hardcore don’t even try it.
Perhaps so, but they should realize they make people who enjoy/want to play the game suffer.
I forgot how evil people can be.
Unfortunately upsetting people is fuel to their fire.
Blizzard has been rather open about any attacks against them over the years. Mostly to keep us in the loop about why their servers are tanking and the fact people can’t login. I’d say if anything it’s just bad that it happens often. Not too often, probably once or twice a year, used to be worse.
I’m logged in, on the game, but can’t do nothing. Cannot run my vaults, the map is blank so I dont know where this boss is, can’t use waypoints…online only Diablo was such a smart move. 
Man this sucks, got prepped for game time and there ain’t no game!
Welp guess I’ll clean the house then…
/throws on some metal, grabs vacuum cleaner
From me to you 
