WoW coulda been silenced by hackers

MILLIONS of geeks were forced away from their machines over the weekend as their virtual World of Warcraft came crashing around their ears.

There is some confusion as to whether the problems that WoW players faced over the weekend was "routine maintenance" as was claimed by Blizzard Entertainment, which runs the game, or a denial of service attack.

The first reference to an outage was when ‘Epifanio', Senior Game Master, told the forums that Blizzard's ISP, which is AT&T, was having some 'significant complications'. As a result the playability on a large portion of realms has been adversely affected, Epifanio said.

This announcement was followed by some "emergency maintenance outages". It seems a little strange that when you are having problems with your ISP to suddenly stop for a bit of server maintenance of your own.

The Netcraft logs for the WoW servers show a pattern which looks remarkably similar to a DoS attack, at least according to Netcraft.

It would not be the first time a MMORPG game has been walloped with a DoS attack. Final Fantasy XI has also been hit before.

More at Netcraft. µ