WoW Classic servers down in apparent DDoS attack

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Classic servers appear to be under a massive Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. It appears that a harassment campaign aimed at derailing the live streams of popular World of Warcraft streamers Asmongold and Sodapoppin are what kicked the DDoS attack off.

While DDoS attacks aren’t unheard of, they’re usually done anonymously, which is what makes this situation rather abnormal since the attacker is live tweeting the entire event. Twitter user UkDrillas claims to be the individual(s) behind the attacks. The pinned tweet on the user profile is a photograph from Asmongold’s stream showing him disconnected.

Rip @Asmongold and @Sodapoppintv

2 options.
Follow the streamers or just cycle through every US and EU pvp server. pic.twitter.com/CCQk7cYmtM

— UkDrillas (@UKDrillas) September 7, 2019

UkDrillas claims to have taken down the following servers:

Faelina
Herod
Stalagg
Fairbanks
Bigglesworth
Blaumeux
Grobbulus
Mograine

They also claimed to have recently caused Overwatch servers to crash.

The attackers claims appear to have validity as there’s a quickly growing thread on the World of Warcraft subreddit with over a hundred comments from users that have been experiencing connection trouble since the tweets began.

In May of last year Romanian citizen, Calin Mateias, was sentenced by a United States District Judge for a massive DDoS attack that he launched against World of Warcraft’s European servers back in 2010. Which is part of what makes UkDrillas incredibly bold for boasting about their claims on Twitter. If they are indeed launching a DDoS attack against Blizzard, and it very much appears so from Reddit and Asmongold’s streams, Blizzard is bound to work with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to identify the individual and press charges.

Update: Blizzard’s Americas Twitter account acknowledges DDoS attack.

Some online services continue to be impacted by a series of DDoS attacks which are resulting in high latency and disconnections. These disruption effects have been felt by a portion of our players, impacting their gaming experience. Thank you again for your continued patience.

— Blizzard CS – The Americas (@BlizzardCS) September 7, 2019

Update 2: Blizzard’s European Customer Support Twitter account has acknowledged the DDoS attack.

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

— Blizzard CS EU (@BlizzardCSEU_EN) September 7, 2019

Update 3: Blizzard’s European Customer Support Twitter account has acknowledged a problem with “outages,” but no mention of a DDoS attack.

We apologise once again for the inconvenience caused by today's outages, we're working to resolve this ASAP #WoWClassic

— Blizzard CS EU (@BlizzardCSEU_EN) September 7, 2019

Update 4: It appears the World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth servers are also impacted by the attack. While I was able to log into my main account on Black Dragonflight, I had to wait nearly a full minute for additional servers to appear and I disconnected when attempting to switch servers.

Update 5: Another attack is affecting Blizzard services a day later, making this weekend a wash for many Blizzard players.

We’ll continue to update this post as more information becomes available.

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