The servers for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare experienced some major difficulties on November 13, with hacker group ‘Lizard Squad’ claiming responsibility.
On November 13, at approximately 10AM Eastern, thousands of CoD fans reported that they were unable to access the servers for the newly released Modern Warfare.
Many users on all three platforms, PC, PS4 and Xbox One, were met with a server error code when attempting to access the game’s online services, with the issues occurring worldwide.
Although some players were still able to access the game, the outage seemed to be widespread. It’s the first major outage on this scale since the game’s launch, which was due to the high volume of players trying to access the game at one time.
Update, 11:20AM EST: It appears most of the server issues have been resolved, with fewer reports coming in. Activision’s status page has no issues identified, stating that all platforms are online.
According to down detector, almost 5000 reports came in at around 10:30AM EST, from all around the world.
Unlike the launch crash though, it appears as if the outage has possibly been caused by a malicious attack, as an account claiming to be the hacking group known as Lizard Squad appears to be bragging about the servers being down.
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https://twitter.com/UGLegion/status/1194637094850826240
On November 9, the same account tweeted that they would take the game’s servers down for being “such a terrible game.”
https://twitter.com/UGLegion/status/1193332334369689606
Lizard Squad also recently claimed responsibility for a widespread crash on the Fortnite servers too, on November 9.
Activision’s own status page is reporting no problems at the time of writing, and the Activision support page is yet to comment on the reports of servers being down.
With millions of players presumably jumping in to play the new CoD so soon after its release on October 25, any major crashes on this scale is certain to attract lots of attention for the hackers, whether they were responsible or not.