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For the second time in almost a month's time, Blizzard's Battle.net services are seemingly under a DDoS attack. Players began having issues at around 10 PM EST, where players began noticing a sudden spike in disconnects. Overwatch, in particular, was seeing disconnects in the Overwatch Competitive playlist, and players were losing SR as a result.
DownDetector saw a very high spike in outage reports earlier in the night but quickly tapered off again. Though the reports to the outage tracker site decreased with time, players would still have difficulties accessing the multiplayer game they were on prior to the outages. Even so, players are still reporting lagging and stutters on social media as the servers seem to still be unstable. A Blizzard Support Employee later confirmed on the Blizzard forums that the cause of the outage was a DDoS attack.
The affected games seem to be focused on Overwatch, Hearthstone, and World of Warcraft. There is less chatter on Call of Duty social media about interruptions of service but DownDetector showed a spike of outage reports from those players as well. The Blizzard Customer Support Twitter page has not said anything about the DDoS attack as of writing. Liz Richardson of Dot Esports noted the escalation of events that the attack was being felt on Overwatch Competitive lobbies around 10 PM EST and escalated into a full notice on the Battle.net PC Launcher by 12 AM EST. The Blizzard Support Employee noted that as time went on, the issues extended into other Battle.net services like the store. As of around 2 AM EST, the employee posted that the "worst of the storm" was seemingly over, but continued to advise caution.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Battle.net was hit with a DDoS attack that inconvenienced gamers, particularly Call of Duty: Warzone fans that wanted to maximize on the Double XP weekend. Just like that attack, the most recent attack seemed short-lived but residual issues can linger for hours after the attack. Even though the servers are stabilizing, gamers are best to leave their respective games be for the night, at least. In the case of Overwatch Competitive, every disconnect, and failure to rejoin the lobby results in lost SR and a timed ban for each offense, regardless of the reason. The ban timer increases for every occurrence, so it's best not to keep trying their luck with issues still occurring.
A DDoS is the last thing that Blizzard and its Support employees want to deal with at this time as the company continues to deal with internal strife. Most recently, a work stoppage sparked by the release of QA contractors forced the company into the spotlight again as it continues to receive backlash from its toxic workplace culture.
Source: Dot Esports