For years we have been working intensively on a more stable and better performance of our server structure by extending and upgrading our server farm or constantly refining and modernizing the code. This is how we managed to get rid of daily and weekly maintenance. Failures due to capacity overload have been reduced to an absolute minimum.

Unfortunately these positive developments are being clouded by vicious attacks on our website called distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). The Electronic Sports League's network has been slowed down and stopped several times recently because of these attacks. The attackers made use of oodles of malware infected different computers. Afterwards they sent endless queries to our servers to charge them to capacity until they were not open for queries anymore.

Some of the queries came from innocent users with infected PCs. Therefore our efforts to stop the attacks, like blocking IPs of attackers are very difficult and often not possible. Bigger websites like Amazon or eBay have been victims of such attacks in the past.

Because of the attacks we have considerable additional expenses that we have to cope with. But worst of all, you, our users, the players of ESL, experience a lot of trouble and frustration because of these attacks. For this reason we wrote this news, to let you know about the downtimes and to ask for your understanding. We are hastily working on a solution to avoid future attacks. But we are also trying to illuminate the last cases. Therefore we are very thankful if you can give us clues of any kind.