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Hacker taunts Blizzard after knocking gamers offline

Gamers may experience more frustration and disruption in the near future.
Written by Charlie Osborne, Contributing Writer

Gaming giant Blizzard experienced an outage which left users attempting to access games frustrated, compounded by the taunts of a cyberattacker claiming responsibility for the disruption.

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On Monday, some users trying to access games including World of Warcraft, Diablo, Hearthstone and Overwatch were met with login issues and were unable to connect to Blizzard's gaming platform.

The outage has been linked to a hacker which claimed responsibility.

Through Twitter, a user by the handle AppleJ4ck taunted Blizzard following the attack, saying "Don't mind me, just doing some preparations.Take care of my packets, Thanks," and blowing them a kiss.

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Screenshot via Twitter

Gamers attempting to play took the news badly, reacting angrily on the microblogging platform only to be mocked further. The cyberattacker who claimed responsibility for the downtime said in response:

"The fact that you let a couple of pixels affect your entire day is just sad, in a way, I'm doing y'all a favor. ;)."

After several hours, Blizzard said the company was investigating "an issue affecting our authentication servers, which may result in failed or slow login attempts," and the "technical issues" were resolved quickly.

However, when asked on Twitter whether the disruption was caused by AppleJ4ck, Blizzard did not respond.

As noted by CSO Online, the hacker considers the attack a "test," and so gamers may experience more issues in the near future.

The name AppleJ4ck has been linked to Lizard Squad, a group which has successfully launched distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the past against targets including the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox Live networks, as well as running a rent-a-DoS service to would-be attackers.

ZDNet has reached out to Blizzard and will update if we hear back.

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