PokerStars, a famous online poker tournament, suffered a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack on their server on Sunday which halted several tournaments and, consequently, forced them to cancel them. The cancellation also included all six main events of the 2022 World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP). As of now, all the main events have been rescheduled for later this fall.

A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is when a huge number of bots flood a website server with large amounts of requests and pings which increases traffic and pushes out other legitimate users trying to access the website. Players were experiencing issues with stability of the poker client software and the game was paused and then eventually canceled.

“Recent site outages on PokerStars were due to DDoS attacks, but we can confirm that all accounts are safe and personal information is secure. The WCOOP Main Event and Sunday Million will now run on the weekend of November 5,” said PokerStars official support.

Buy-ins and fees were refunded and prizes were awarded based on PokerStars’ cancellation policy. PokerStars also confirmed that it was not a hack and the funds are secure, it was just an attack to disrupt players from accessing tournaments. “We have a great track record of keeping our platform operational, however we know how frustrating it can be to experience this kind of disruption, especially during our WCOOP and Galactic series. We’d like to apologize to everyone affected and thank them for their patience,” PokerStars wrote on their blog.

DDoS attacks do not only happen in the online poker world but in any real-time or live service dependent game as well. It does not steal any kind of information but does try to negatively affect players.

“We are not going to let these actions prevent us from crowning 2022 WCOOP Main Event Champions and are now planning to run the Main Events on the weekend of November 5. There WILL be champions in 2022!” quoted PokerStars.