Daybreak Game Company suffers DDoS attack, Lizard Squad claims credit

Earlier this week, Daybreak Game Company CEO John Smedley made an entirely unveiled threat toward recently-convicted Lizard Squad member Julius Kivimaki, after it came to light that the 17-year-old would not face jail time for his crimes. "His parents need to be held accountable for his actions in addition to his going to jail," Smedley tweeted. "So I'm coming for you Julius."

Smedley was understandably upset. As he explained on Reddit (via Eurogamer), a plane he was on last year was diverted by a bomb threat made by Kivimaki, who was also involved in sending Smedley pictures of his father's grave "with nasty stuff on it." He said he's been swatted multiple times, had his entire credit history posted online, and had multiple social networks hacked. He's "extremely angry" that Kivimaki was handed a two-year suspended sentence for his crimes, and so he wants to pursue the matter himself.

"I want this kind in jail for a long time. You shouldn't be able to do crap like this without any hint of a consequence," Smedley wrote. "This shit is real to my life and my family's life and I'm sure as hell not lying down for it for a second. I've been working with law enforcement to put him and others into jail where they belong. Some of them are minors which makes it tough. Most of them are outside the US, which makes it tougher. But I'm patient and I'm going to be relentless about this."

Unfortunately, it appears that his public display of outrage has had some negative consequences for his company. Daybreak first tweeted reports of problems yesterday, when it said it was "investigating reported issues with connectivity both in-game and on our websites/forums." The trouble persisted across all Daybreak games, websites, and forums until this morning, when it appeared to subside. Shortly thereafter, however, it began again. In its most recent tweet, posted around noon ET, Daybreak wrote, "This is an unplanned outage. The teams are working to resolve it, but we do not have an ETA at this time."

It's not exactly an official channel, but the @LizardLands Twitter account did claim credit for the attack. "Getting reports that the attack is affecting all Daybreak Game Company games. Hope you like our present John Smedley," it tweeted when the attacks first began. A pinned tweet from around the same time states simply, "H1Z1 #offline #lizardsquad."

At the moment, the Daybreak website is up but appears to be sluggish, as is H1Z1, but Planetside 2 could not be reached. We'll update when Daybreak sounds the all-clear.