World of Warcraft Classic may be so popular that players are queueing in-game to get to the quests they want, but another cause of long waits is that the servers keep getting taken down by cyber attacks. Clearly, some people aren't happy with World of Warcraft players having fun because they're targeting Blizzard's US servers with DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.
DDoS attacks are when someone with control of a large network of computers has them all direct requests at the same server. This wave of incoming messages overloads the server, which tries to respond to all inbound communications.
The attacks appear to largely be taking down US servers, though EU servers were also targeted.
Blizzard tweeted on Saturday that "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."
A Twitter account called UKDrillas claimed responsibility for the attack, tweeting ahead of one of the outages that it would be taking the servers down. Since then the account has been suspended but there hasn't been any confirmation that the group is responsible. They also claim to be taking down Twitch streamers' channels and Wikipedia.
Naturally, World of Warcraft players are frustrated that they can't make it into the game, but if it's any consolation, long server queues is very true to the original game's experience. Back in 2004, when World of Warcraft launched, Error 37 became famous. The "game login servers are busy or down" seemed to pop up pretty much every time you'd try to play. That was down to Warcraft's popularity, though, not asshole's with a botnet.
Featured Image Credit:Topics: Blizzard Entertainment, World of Warcraft