So it looks like Minecraft is down right now and it’s all over twitter at the moment. A bunch of people are asking why it goes down so frequent and when it goes down why can’t they connect to their own servers hosted on machines that are independent of minecraft.net. I spent some time looking into this and there are a few reasons but first you need to know why it even matters if the site is down.
When you open minecraft it pushes 2 post requests to minecraft.net. The first one is to verify the username and password. The second one is when you go to join a server. It is at this point where minecraft is unreachable and therefore gives out an error of “took to long to log in.” Now here are the reasons why it may be down.
- DDoS Attacks. A distributed denial of service attack is a method that attackers use to disrupt a service. There has been word that 4chan and other *chans are attacking minecraft because of the lulz.
- The website may be down for maintenance.
- The server is overloaded with players.
Out of these 3 it is most likely the first one so we get to wait until it comes back online. Cmon Notch get some ddos mitigation!