Indie game storefront itch.io reportedly suffers multiple DDoS attacks just one week after Steam

Late last night, the video game PC storefront itch.io reportedly suffered a DDoS attack. This is noteworthy, given that it was just last week that a major DDoS attack hit Steam, Riot Games, and many other video game-related sites and services. This incident was confirmed by itch.io on BlueSky, which also explained the strange response from itch.io’s host, which was to “…just turn off our site.” The site was restored several hours after the attack began last night, but it seems to have been under attack again for the last few hours.

PC storefront itch.io suffers a DDoS attack one week after Steam and other gaming services

At least for the Steam attack last week, the prominent theory for who is responsible is AISURU, a botnet that saw a massive jump in activity around the same time. There has been no confirmation of the source from the itch.io team, so all we can do at this point is speculate. But no matter who is responsible, one thing is certain. As attacks like this become more common, “turning off the site” may no longer be a useful strategy.

Posts from itch.io on BlueSky explaining the issues.Source: BlueSky

Apparently, this has become so common that one user has gone out of their way to create an uptime tracker, which they shared in a comment on a Reddit post about the attack. This user, KenNL, explained that they are a seller on itch.io, and aired some of their frustrations with the site’s response to this attack: “…as a seller on itch.io, it’s getting ridiculous and itch.io always seems to point at others instead of talking about how they’ll get protection.” Here, KenNL is referring to itch.io blaming their host for their strange solution to the problem.

Even aside from the site going down due to external attacks, itch.io has had to deal with other major issues lately as well. You may remember a few months ago, when both Steam and itch.io came under fire for NSFW titles, leading many to be unlisted or outright removed. Within that, itch.io has also had issues with sending payments to creators. This was perhaps most notable when the huge game Vintage Story shared their frustrations, but as we learned by talking to other itch.io creators, it’s more of a widespread problem than you probably thought.

For now, we’ll have to see what happens with itch.io. At the time of writing, I can access the site, though the team has yet to post on social media about this second outage in 24 hours. This does not help itch.io’s case of being a great place for independent developers to reliably sell their games, though, with Steam under attack these days, too, it’s hard to suggest an alternative.

• indie games
• DDoS