Itchio Went Down For Much of the Weekend Due to Bot Attacks, Affecting Thousands

Indie game distribution platform itch.io was hit with multiple major outages over the weekend, according to the website Down For Everyone or Just Me, which is another website that tracks service disruptions across the web. The site isn’t available on the more popular DownDetector, though Drillimation Systems has requested Ookla to add the site in an email, and they are currently in the process of doing so. Throughout much of Saturday and Sunday from September 13-14, 2025, players and developers were reportedly unable to access the site.

The outage reportedly began at 6 AM Eastern Daylight Time Saturday morning, before receiving a surge in reports around noon and then peaking at 3PM that afternoon. Things didn’t get back to normal at around 8 PM, with the outage lasting between 10 and 14 hours. More than 2,300 users reported outages on Down For Everyone or Just Me. Things seemed to be normal again until a second outage hit the site the following morning starting at 5 AM, lasting for a few hours with over 140 reports of outages. Then, just as lunchtime rolled around, the site went down again for six more hours, with over 2,500 reports from users. Itch Corp has confirmed that the outages were the result of bots making large amounts of access requests, causing the site to slow down and crash.

itch.io plays a massive role in empowering indie game developers and the players of those games. It is one of the primary game distribution services, competing with Steam and GameJolt. This is not the first time this year the site was hit by a large-scale outage that spanned multiple calendar days; the site was hit by a denial-of-service attack earlier this year in July, preventing players from accessing the site during the late evening and early morning hours of July 7-8, 2025. Another outage of unknown causes also took place the month before, preventing access to the site for five hours.