World of Warcraft Expansion Hit with DDoS Attack
In addition to wanting your money and personal information, malicious hackers also apparently do not want you to have any fun. Massively multiplayer online (MMO) hit World of Warcraft is about to celebrate its tenth birthday, and just released Warlords of Draenor, its fifth expansion. This did not sit well with some malefactors, who launched a distributed denial-of-service attack on its servers and prevented many players from logging in.
Blizzard detailed the process in its official forums, and while things are starting to calm down, Warlords of Draenor was inaccessible for large swaths of both North America and Europe for quite a few hours after launch. The company did not give exact details about the DDoS attack, save to confirm that it happened. No party has yet taken credit for it.
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In practical terms, this meant that Blizzard had to enact lowered maximum server populations and implement queues. Since characters are tied to specific servers, simply shuffling them around was not possible. Many players had to wait for hours to log in, only to get booted off due to overcrowding or locations timing out.
European servers seem to be in better shape than their North American counterparts, so Blizzard is focusing most of its attention on the Western hemisphere at the moment. North American servers are currently undergoing maintenance that will end at approximately noon EST today (Nov. 14). Login times should improve after that, although an influx of weekend players may also put undue stress on the servers.
If you bought Warlords of Draenor and can't log in yet, there's not much you can do other than be patient or create a new character on a European server. What a DDoS against World of Warcraft was supposed to accomplish is anyone's guess, but it did succeed in giving both Blizzard and its customers a big headache.
Marshall Honorof is a Staff Writer for Tom's Guide. Contact him at mhonorof@tomsguide.com. Follow him @marshallhonorof and on Google+. Follow us @tomsguide, on Facebook and on Google+.
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