Faceit grand finals plagued by apparent DDoS attacks

The $250,000 FaceIt 2015 League Championships were decided in the early hours of Monday morning as Team SoloMid triumphed over Ninjas In Pyjamas. But most fans didn’t get to see it happen.

As the two teams prepared to enter the first game of their final series, internet troubles arose, as the stream started to drop out. Commentators Daniel “DDK” Kapadia and James “JZFB” Bardolph were forced to stall for time. But the problems persisted, and to keep fans engaged the production team marched through to the caster desk to try and fill time. It worked for a time. Christopher “GeT_RiGhT” Alesund and Peter “Dupreeh” Rasmussen in particular proved they might have a second career as entertainers. But the viewers began to get impatient.

The match finally started with the teams playing on a local offline server. Viewers were able to see the first few rounds of game one, before a stream outage arose yet again. When the stream finally did come back online, several rounds had passed and it was clear the Ninjas were going to win. Throughout the final two games, the stream continued to suffer outages before finally stabilizing during the final map.

It’s not clear who the culprit was. But one obscure Twitter account, created not long before the final, took responsibility, claiming that the admins had wrongfully banned him, either from the Twitch chat or the FaceIt service itself, and that he was retaliating with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

okok, faceit. you maderfaker.

Worst admins, banning ppl without a proper reason, YOU NAOW GO #OFFLINE MADERFAKER

— Lax Squad (@laxsquadcsgo) May 3, 2015

What followed was a string of tweets counting down to followup attacks. The user, going by the name “Lax Squad” ended the night with the message “It was a fun night. CU @Dreamhack”.

Faceit apologized for the problems, ensuring viewers it will upload the full broadcast to its YouTube channel and rebroadcast it as soon as possible. The organization has yet to comment on what the cause of the issue was, or confirm in any way that Lax Squad was really behind the attack, saying only that it had suffered “Network issues.” Faceit did, however, retweet Gfinity Creative Director Robert Ohlen, who was at the event and seemed to lay the blame on a DDoSer:

Hangin with the fine folk over @FACEIT

And screw ddos trolls pic.twitter.com/SkVqd1Z8UF

— JustAGuy (@robertlescieur) May 3, 2015