Diablo 4 Players Demand An Offline Mode After DDoS Attack Halts Logins

In the early morning of Sunday, Diablo IV fans found they could not log in and authenticate to Blizzard’s servers to play the game. What started as an outage became publicly known as a DDoS attack against Blizzard, lasting multiple hours into the afternoon. Though the problem is now fixed, it reignited the question of why buy games if you cannot play them in offline single-player?

At around 12:53 am, Blizzard Entertainment North America customer support tweeted that they were investigating login issues with Diablo 4. Eight hours later, they tweeted that this was an issue with the company’s authentication servers which “may result in failed or slow login attempts.” This is around the time when the third wave of Downdetector outages hit with around 5,435 reports which slowly trickled off throughout the day.


Around 9:24 am, a follow-up tweet announced that Blizzard was experiencing a DDoS attack against Battle.NET and not necessarily Diablo 4, but evidently, it was being hit the hardest. Thankfully this issue has since resolved itself, but folks on the internet waiting for Diablo 4 to return were quick to make light of the situation with memes and questions about why offline single-player Diablo 4 was not an option.


If players want to play in single-player mode, they still must be connected to the Diablo 4 servers that require authentication. If you cannot log in, however, then you are unable to play the game in any way, which seems absurd to many. These DDoS attacks are bound to happen, so having even just a failover of offline single-player might be a worthwhile endeavor. That way, players are always online when able, but otherwise, they can play offline while they wait for the game to come back.  Sadly, some people might only have one opportunity to sit down at a game and if it is down then that blows their chance at playing for the week. 


Of course, there is the concern that offline play could be abused or the only thing that people play in their spare time. However, that might draw more folks to the game in the first place, and it becomes a net gain overall. Regardless, the game is back online now, so get back to grinding your gear and let us know what you think in the comments below.