The servers for the cutesy customizable platformer LittleBigPlanet have been temporarily taken offline. Sony confirmed as much in a tweet earlier today, but a number of community members speaking to Eurogamer seem to suspect that a DDoS attack is to blame for the outage.
DDoS, or distributed denial-of-service, attacks are a persistent concern for online games, even those under the management of major game companies like Sony with sizable resources at their disposal.
Typically, the targeted attacks aim to flood servers for certain games or services with enough traffic to take them offline and make online features for the targeted games or platforms inaccessible to its players.
Similar attacks have been targeted at games like Blizzard’s World of Warcraft Classic and Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege in the past, with the latter notably seeing lawsuits levied by Ubisoft at the people and websites behind the attacks.
Sony has only confirmed that the LittleBigPlanet servers are down while it “[investigates] some technical issues,” but players speaking to Eurogamer say that they’ve had trouble accessing online-hosted community content for a number of games in the franchise over the past week. The individual behind the attacks, according to those players, is themself a disgruntled LittleBigPlanet player unhappy with the current direction of the franchise.