Minecraft Server Hit By DDoS Attack, Update Motive Alleged

The home page for recent indie success story Minecraft were hit with a distributed denial of service attack this week, supposedly orchestrated by fans of the game demanding more updates from creator Markus Persson. Persson first noted the attack on Minecraft's official website on his development blog on Wednesday, and the site remained down through much of Thursday thanks to a flood of page requests designed to cripple the server. The site is back up as of this writing late Friday. While Persson said on his blog that he was not sure of the reasons behind the attack, an anonymous poster on 4chan claimed the attack was designed to convince Persson to provide more content for the game, which is still in alpha. "[The attack]’s purpose is to send [Persson] a clear message of how the future of Minecraft will turn out unless he gets to work, namely by influencing the amount of sales taking place, due to the attacks," the poster wrote. "Start providing your customers with the updates that you promise them." After consulting with his web host on getting the server back up, Persson said through his blog that he would "just get back to coding, then." Minecraft has gone from being largely unknown just months ago to selling over 320,000 copies as of earlier this month, enough to reportedly net solo creator Persson over $4 million. Gamasutra columnist Margaret Robertson recently took a second look at the game and was quickly hooked by the game elegant, open-yet-directed design.