Quote Originally Posted by Lucyfurr1988 View Post
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Most commonly its showcasing. At least against the bigger platforms it is.

If you are a ddos hoster and you can show you can take out a big platform, taking out a smaller one poses no problems. This makes it more likely that someone who wants to do damage will go for your platform to perform certain attacks.
And those attacks are nearly always for extortion. Pay X to make the ddos stop, or suffer Y days worth of damage in which your company cant operate.

That a game platform doesnt go down however, can mean it is a single person behind it, but even at this scale, that is quite a cost to make. Its unlikely that a random individual is behind that. There is almost always a company behind attacks at this scale. The intention of that company is unknown though and can be several things.

There is also the option that SE had some ddos protection ready, wanted to test it in runtime, yet the protection failed, so it caused problems. Not all companies are willing to openly admit mistakes here. But there is a good reason to not disclose it. If you admit you did the test yourself, you only bait someone into trying more ddos attacks. Its very conveniently just before a maintenance moment so if servers crashed more severely, this window would have given more time to fix it.
Ending the ddos early in those cases however would reveal it was them, and not even give them a good chance to test proper mitigation. So even then, you just keep it running.