DotA 2’s The International managed to raise a whopping $18 million in prize money ahead of the competition, basically indicating just how popular the game and the scene is. However it looks like during one of the competitions, a DDoS attack forced the tournament’s organizers to delay it.
This was confirmed in a report from VentureBeat who said that Valve’s on-stage commentators revealed the reason the competition had been paused was due to a DDoS attack. This essentially put the entire competition on pause for a good 3 hours. The games have since resumed but safe to say that no one, including the players and the audience who had to wait, was happy about it.
Valve has yet to comment on the attack, but it seems like this isn’t the first time the competition has run into connectivity issues. Ever since it was launched, connection issues have plagued the game. This has affected the matches (obviously) along with live streams on YouTube and Twitch, although to be fair this recent issue had nothing to do with Valve.
That being said with games such as DotA 2 being an online game, we suppose such attacks can be expected, but hopefully Valve will be able to come up with a better infrastructure and security system to prevent something like this from happening again.