Overwatch servers down following potential Lizard Squad DDoS attack

Blizzard has once again come under attack from hacking group Lizard Squad.

The collective appears to have DDoS’d the publisher’s servers for its new online shooter Overwatch. One member of Lizard Squad, AppleJ4ck has claimed alluded to being responsible for the outage (below).

DDoS, or a Distributed Denial of Service, is when a large number of users bombard and overload a server with tiny packets of information.

If the name Lizard Squad sounds at all familiar, that’s because the group was behind the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live outages at the end of 2014. That’s on top of attacks on Blizzard’s servers earlier this year, as well as the National Crime Agency in 2015. DDoS attacks were used in all of the above.

Following the Xbox Live and PSN attacks, two members of the group ended up in court – one in Canada, another in Finland.

We're currently investigating an issue affecting our authentication servers, which may result in failed or slow login attempts. #BlizzCS

— Blizzard CS – The Americas (@BlizzardCS) June 20, 2016

https://twitter.com/AppleJ4ckxoxo/status/744774355767406592