Hackers batter Origin, Steam, Battle.net and League of Legends

A series of apparent attacks by hackers on the likes of Steam, Origin and Battle.net has resulted in outages and downtime for all of the services.

A number of hackers have claimed responsibility for the disruption, which caused EA to take down its servers temporarily as it tackled the problem.

Steam is also said to have suffered issues afflicting the Steam Store, while Blizzard’s Battle.net and League of Legends are also said to have experienced issues.

There appears to be little explanation as to why the hacking attempts have taken place on such a large scale, and whether it is a coordinated effort.

Those claiming responsibility however have suggested the outages were caused by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

The issue of hacking has become an increasingly large problem for developers, platform holders and digital distribution firms alike during the last couple of years.

Last year World of Tanks, Eve Online and Dust 514 were just a few titles that became the victims of hacking attempts.

In 2011, Sony became the victim of a large scale PSN attack, which saw millions of users’ personal data stolen.

Following the security breach, one of the largest in history given the PS3 had roughly 77 million registered users, Sony took down the PSN for 24 days.

As an apology and show of good faith, the console giant offered a number of free games, such as InFamous and Ratchet and Clank, to its users.