DDoS attacks nearly checkmate Chess.com ahead of PogChamps 5 event

For over 1,500 years, chess has remained one of the world’s most popular games and has successfully made the leap from the board to the screen online thanks to sites like Chess.com. However, the move online brings about its own drawbacks, as was discovered this week when a hacker attempted to put the site in check.

Chess.com was the victim of DDoS throughout the past week, mostly from July 22 to 25. The site attributed the attacks to “malicious hackers,” which led to downtime for the site across the week. A July 27 tweet confirmed multiple attacks had occurred but were ultimately repelled, with Chess.com thanking IT company Cloudflare for assistance in seeing the website return to operations ahead of the hotly-anticipated PogChamps Five event.

DDoS attacks (distributed denial-of-service) are a form of hacking, with the culprit using a flood of traffic to overload servers and crashing them intentionally. Chess.com was the latest victim of this common tactic, but Cloudflare chief executive officer Matthew Prince and his team were crucial to helping slow down the attacks and keeping the chess servers online.

This was critical considering the proximity of the PogChamps Five event, starting on July 27 and stretching until Aug. 18, live from Los Angeles, California. Online matches will be broadcast on Chess.com’s YouTube and Twitch channels as well as on the main website. As the event’s host, popular streamer Ludwig will also be streaming PogChamps Five on his YouTube channel. Streamers like Tyler1, xQc, Sykkuno, QTCinderella, and many more are competing in the event.

Related: How to watch the PogChamps 5 chess tournament on Twitch

PogChamps Five’s prize pool totals $100,000 USD, with an extra $12,000 up for grabs for performance throughout the group stage. Players will battle for the lion’s share of $20,000 for winning the tournament.

Not even the servers going down will prevent these content creators from trying to get the upper hand on the chessboard. PogChamps Five is live now and concludes with the live finals on Aug. 10.